On Thu, 2012-08-16 at 20:28 +0000, Jiang Wang wrote: [...] > Also, I have another comment related to link state. > > Right now, the bnx2 driver powers up the device in bnx2_init_board(), > regardless the netif_carrier is on or off. This may introduce > following inconsistent behaviors: > 1) suppose the cable is plugged in to the NIC and the other end is > connected to a switch > 2) user powers up the box > 3) the Linux does not bring up the interface; i.e, ifconfig ethx shows > it is down
Most distributions will bring up all interfaces at boot, by default. > 4) ethtool ethx will show no link > 5) if the user goes to check the light on the physical NIC, he will > see the green link light is ON. That means the link is up, right? > > I think it is better to power down the device until bnx2_open is > called. In this way, ethtool report and the physical link light will > be consistent. [...] In general, a physical network interface may need to be enabled to allow management traffic to a BMC, even when the interface is in the 'down' state on the host. The link state should be considered unknown whenever the interface is down, and /sys/class/net/$IFACE/carrier is not readable then. However ETHTOOL_GLINK is not expected to fail in this way, and must always return 0 (down) or 1 (up). The convention (which is now enforced in ethtool_get_link()) is that when the interface is down it should always return 0. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings, Staff Engineer, Solarflare Not speaking for my employer; that's the marketing department's job. They asked us to note that Solarflare product names are trademarked. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
