From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: David Brownell Subject: Re: Patch: link state notification for 2.5.41 Date: Sat, 12 Oct 2002 08:10:49 -0700 Sender: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com Message-ID: <3DA83B79.3060302@pacbell.net> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: netdev@oss.sgi.com Return-path: To: jamal Errors-to: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org [ CCs trimmed ] > BTW, did you ping the USB people on notPresent? At least one of them i > think participated in that discussion. That was likely me. :) > -Anyway, I wanted to keep the current semantics of > netif_carrier_on()/_off(). The extended states that can be found RFC2863 > did not seem to useful to me for linux, mainly because "notPresent" is > already implemented with netif_device_detach()/_attach() and especially > for ethernet drivers there is no real difference between "testing" and > "down". The "link active" issue for hotplug is perhaps just that while userspace sees /sbin/hotplug notifications when network interfaces are registered or unregistered, the right time to autoconfigure is actually when the link connects to a net ... or reconnects to a different one. So we really want (hotplug) events other than link register/unregister. (And some systems will want the events through a daemon instead.) So long as there's a clean way to generate such events, and to use them to trigger autoconfiguration, my basic concern is addressed. Delivery issues should be a lot easier to resolve. I think I mentioned the notPresent bit purely as an RFC conformance issue, since I was trying to make sense of what the kernel code was expected/intended to do. - Dave