Re: [PATCH 7/9] [ETH]: Start net device with carrier down

[Trent Piepho <tpiepho@freescale.com>]

On Wed, 24 Sep 2008, David Miller wrote:
> From: Trent Piepho <tpiepho@freescale.com>
> Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:20:55 -0700
>
>> The problem is that when the device is first created and opened, the state
>> bit indicating the carrier is down isn't set, i.e. the state is wrong.
>> When the carrier comes up for the first time no netlink event is sent,
>> since the device state indicated the carrier was already up.
>
> It works properly if the device driver does as it is supposed to,
> which is invoke netif_carrier_off() in it's ->open() method in this
> situation.
>
> Please fix the drivers where this is not happening.

I tried that first, but if the carrier is already up, opening the interface
generated extra rt-netlink messages for carrier down then carrier up, even
though the carrier was up all along.

But maybe I didn't have it at the right place in the open() method.  I'll try
Stephen's suggestion to put it after allocation but before register_netdev()
and see if the problem is still there.