From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jeff Garzik Subject: the future of ethtool Date: Mon, 15 Nov 2010 14:41:30 -0500 Message-ID: <4CE18CEA.5080502@garzik.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: NetDev , David Miller To: Ben Hutchings Return-path: Received: from mail-vw0-f46.google.com ([209.85.212.46]:52705 "EHLO mail-vw0-f46.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1757936Ab0KOTle (ORCPT ); Mon, 15 Nov 2010 14:41:34 -0500 Received: by vws13 with SMTP id 13so1858631vws.19 for ; Mon, 15 Nov 2010 11:41:33 -0800 (PST) Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Thanks for accepting ethtool maintainership. There are two key unresolved issues with ethtool that are worth noting to the next maintainer. Both of these come from years of user and customer complaints. 1) ethtool command line interface. For 1,001 minor reasons of user taste and expectation, people tend to complain about the command line interface. Due to script usage it is set in stone, and has been since before my tenure. But users continually request something more flexible, often, in particular, wanting to set multiple settings in one execution, or wanting to apply the same setting to multiple interface in one execution. Obviously one can script this, but, it is probably the #1 user request. My thought was to create "nictool", a new tool with more flexible command line interface, using the same old ethtool ioctls currently in use today. ('nictool' also solves a minor naming complaint from wireless and other people, who use ethtool on non-ethernet network interfaces) 2) multiple settings and the ethtool kernel interface Another common complaint is related to multiple settings, and associated hardware NIC resets. Many ethtool driver implementations look like this: ethtool_op_do_something() stop RX/TX apply settings perform full NIC reset, consuming much time start RX/TX The problem arises when the user wishes to change multiple hardware attributes at the same time. A user wishing to change 4 attributes could wind up with 4 ethtool(1) invocations, with 4 accompanying hardware NIC resets. Time consuming, inefficient, and unnecessary. Obviously the world has not ended without these changes, but these items do cause continued complaints from users, and we're here to be responsive to users presumably ;-) Jeff