From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Stephen Hemminger Subject: Re: mii-tool gigabit support. Date: Fri, 29 Sep 2006 10:12:15 -0700 Message-ID: <20060929101215.649a9e32@freekitty> References: <20060926145113.7a6791c8@freekitty> <4519A1D6.1050802@pobox.com> <451AD1D6.4030708@intel.com> <1159546378.2761.5.camel@dhollis-lnx.sunera.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Auke Kok , dean gaudet , Jeff Garzik , dhinds@pcmcia.sourceforge.org, netdev@vger.kernel.org Return-path: Received: from smtp.osdl.org ([65.172.181.4]:44759 "EHLO smtp.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1422640AbWI2RPF (ORCPT ); Fri, 29 Sep 2006 13:15:05 -0400 To: David Hollis In-Reply-To: <1159546378.2761.5.camel@dhollis-lnx.sunera.com> Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org On Fri, 29 Sep 2006 12:12:58 -0400 David Hollis 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 .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