Re: Network drivers that don't suspend on interface down

[Olivier Galibert <galibert@pobox.com>]

On Wed, Dec 20, 2006 at 02:38:51PM +0100, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> [1] What kind of latency would be allowed? Would an implementation be
> allowed to power up the phy say once per minute or once per 5 minutes to
> see if there is link? The implementation could do this progressively;
> first poll every X seconds, then after an hour, every minute etc.

I suspect that the hard maximum latency is the time needed by the user
to start the network himself, be it opening a root xterm and doing the
appropriate invocation or pulling up and clicking where appropriate in
a GUI.  That's probably around 5 seconds.  Over that, and they won't
even notice there is an autodetection running.

But still, 5 seconds is probably too much too, because it's going to
look like it's unreliable.  The user has to see something happen
within half-a-second or so, otherwise he's going to start doing it by
hand.  The "see" part is distribution/desktop-dependant and not the
kernel problem, but the top chrono happens when the rj45 is plugged
in.

  OG.