From: Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@mandrakesoft.com>
To: Chris Wedgwood <cw@f00f.org>
Cc: Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
netdev@oss.sgi.com, "David S. Miller" <davem@redhat.com>
Subject: Re: PATCH: ethtool MII helpers
Date: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 01:58:37 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <3B32DE8D.72C1CFF9@mandrakesoft.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <3B23AFC3.71CE2FD2@mandrakesoft.com> <20010622171037.D2576@metastasis.f00f.org> <3B32D694.CACF46D0@mandrakesoft.com> <20010622173459.D2642@metastasis.f00f.org>
Chris Wedgwood wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jun 22, 2001 at 01:24:36AM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:
>
> Sure, and that's planned. Wanna send me a patch for it? :)
>
> Possibly, but I wonder if this is a kernel-space problem or not. Why
> not put all the smarts into userland for it?
I meant, send me a patch for userland ethtool, to do exactly what you
described.
> It will definitely fall back on the MII ioctls if ethtool media
> support for the desired command doesn't exist.
>
> Well, that is more or less as much as needs to be done. That, and
> some kind of super-set API to be defined for all new stuff, having
> two slightly different APIs for the same things sucks.
Both APIs do different things but have a common subset, yes.
The MII ioctls only do their thing for MII-like hardware. ethtool can
be applied to any hardware. Old ISA drivers that don't do MII, or do it
in a really nonstandard way. For example I have ethtool code locally
which allows ne2k-pci to do media selection via ioctl, for two popular
ne2k cards, something its never been able to do before. Emulating media
selection support for things like 10base2<->10baseT<->AUI just isn't
possible with the MII ioctls.
MII is a standard and incredibly popular, thus mii-tool works most
popular PCI NICs, for the most popular media types. But it's still
basically a hardware interface. I am not convinced its a good idea for
make the [G]MII ioctls the Linux software media interface for all
network hardware.
I see ethtool as the interface for tuning your NIC, that works across
all hardware.
I see mii-diag as the way to do advance MII-specific hardware stuff,
like next page or HA monitoring or whatever.
Jeff
--
Jeff Garzik | Andre the Giant has a posse.
Building 1024 |
MandrakeSoft |
prev parent reply other threads:[~2001-06-22 5:59 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 14+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2001-06-10 17:34 PATCH: ethtool MII helpers Jeff Garzik
2001-06-11 5:59 ` Pekka Savola
2001-06-11 6:10 ` Keith Owens
2001-06-12 17:09 ` Bogdan Costescu
2001-06-12 17:40 ` Jeff Garzik
2001-06-12 18:40 ` PATCH: ethtool MII helpers (vers 2) Jeff Garzik
2001-06-13 15:29 ` PATCH: ethtool MII helpers Bogdan Costescu
2001-06-13 16:56 ` Donald Becker
2001-06-13 20:24 ` Jeff Garzik
2001-06-15 17:22 ` Bogdan Costescu
2001-06-22 5:10 ` Chris Wedgwood
2001-06-22 5:24 ` Jeff Garzik
2001-06-22 5:34 ` Chris Wedgwood
2001-06-22 5:58 ` Jeff Garzik [this message]
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