Re: mii-tool gigabit support.

[Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@osdl.org>]

On Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12:12:58 -0400
David Hollis <dhollis@davehollis.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 2006-09-27 at 12:32 -0700, Auke Kok wrote:
> > dumping registers in readable format is an extension that needs to be 
> > implemented per driver. Not all nics have done this - we just did it
> > ourselves 
> > for ixgb, and I saw skge/sky2 just fly by this week. 
> 
> This has always bothered me a bit with ethtool.  It really stinks that
> we have to actually write code and generate patches and get everyone to
> update a utility just to be able to get this type of access.  I see two
> ways to make the situation better:  1) add extensions to the drivers
> themselves to be able to report this which would likely lead to a lot of
> driver bloat and too much user-space style info (like verbose
> descriptions of the register and it's purpose) or 2) develop some style
> of register description definition type of text file, maybe XML, maybe
> INI style or something stored in /etc/ethtool as <drivername>.conf or
> something like that.  This way, ethtool doesn't have to be
> changed/updated/patched/likely-bug-added for every single device known
> to man.  
> 
> Just a thought.
 
We could switch to shared libraries like 'tc' uses.


-- 
Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@osdl.org>