From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Thomas Graf <tgraf@infradead.org>
Subject: Re: the future of ethtool
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2010 01:25:53 -0500
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Cc: Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>,
	Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@vyatta.com>,
	NetDev <netdev@vger.kernel.org>,
	David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
To: Ben Hutchings <bhutchings@solarflare.com>
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On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 12:10:30AM +0000, Ben Hutchings wrote:
> I would expect to treat each operation in a multiple-set as conditional
> on the success of all previous operations.  ethtool or other utilities
> should then take care to put operations in a sensible order (e.g. enable
> TX checksum before TSO, if those remain separate operations).  Error
> reporting in the core is then as simple as reporting how many operations
> were successful plus the error code for the one that failed.

This is already not that trivial with current netlink limitations.
We are pretty much limited to a single int when returning error
states. One more reason to rethink current netlink error semantics.