Every sysvar has an associated help text, but it's only accessible as mysqld --help which is kind of a waste. It would be helpful to show it as a third column in INFORMATION_SCHEMA.GLOBAL_VARIABLES and INFORMATION_SCHEMA.SESSION_VARIABLES. For backward compatibility we'll hide this column if @@old_mode=NO_SYSVAR_HELP.

Alternatively, we could introduce a new table, say, INFORMATION_SCHEMA.SYSTEM_VARIABLES with all (global and session) variables, without their current values, but with the help, type, valid value range, etc.