> I've seen a few others that are weird though-- collision recovery 
 > algorithm tuning (enable proprietary back off algorithms), wake-on-lan 
 > tweaks, inter-packet-gap tuning, tweaks to support extended cabling, 
 > signal enhancement tweaks, proprietary (Bay networks) PHY based flow 
 > control schemes. Any of those would be private tunables. Many of them 
 > shouldn't be adjusted by the vast majority of sites. I'm not sure its 
 > fair to "hide" them, though. (Which is what lack of an enumeration API 
 > does.)

They are not really hidden, they are just not discoverable directly
through dladm.  That is, the driver that has the proprietary PHY-based
flow control scheme can document that in its manpage, along with what the
various settings mean.  Again, I believe this is the right balance.  I
have not yet seen a convincing case made for a driver-private tunable the
admin needs to muck with where they can't be bothered to read the driver
manpage to learn about it first.

(As an aside, our network driver manpages really need some work -- many of
them still describe common stuff that is automatically handled by GLDv3,
and suggest direct programmatic access via DLPI primitives on their /dev
node; all of this text needs to be updated and much of it needs to be
changed to reference a common manpage that describes interacting with
/dev/net nodes.  This has been on my TODO list forever but I never seem to
get to it.)

--
meem
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