Re: PATCH: ethtool MII helpers

[Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@mandrakesoft.com>]

Chris Wedgwood wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jun 22, 2001 at 01:24:36AM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> 
>     Sure, and that's planned.  Wanna send me a patch for it?  :)
> 
> Possibly, but I wonder if this is a kernel-space problem or not. Why
> not put all the smarts into userland for it?

I meant, send me a patch for userland ethtool, to do exactly what you
described.


>     It will definitely fall back on the MII ioctls if ethtool media
>     support for the desired command doesn't exist.
> 
> Well, that is more or less as much as needs to be done. That, and
> some kind of super-set API to be defined for all new stuff, having
> two slightly different APIs for the same things sucks.

Both APIs do different things but have a common subset, yes.

The MII ioctls only do their thing for MII-like hardware.  ethtool can
be applied to any hardware.  Old ISA drivers that don't do MII, or do it
in a really nonstandard way.  For example I have ethtool code locally
which allows ne2k-pci to do media selection via ioctl, for two popular
ne2k cards, something its never been able to do before.  Emulating media
selection support for things like 10base2<->10baseT<->AUI just isn't
possible with the MII ioctls.

MII is a standard and incredibly popular, thus mii-tool works most
popular PCI NICs, for the most popular media types.  But it's still
basically a hardware interface.  I am not convinced its a good idea for
make the [G]MII ioctls the Linux software media interface for all
network hardware.

I see ethtool as the interface for tuning your NIC, that works across
all hardware.
I see mii-diag as the way to do advance MII-specific hardware stuff,
like next page or HA monitoring or whatever.

	Jeff


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