On Wed, 15 Jan 2003, D Qi wrote:
> It will be nice if I can reconfigure the network device driver after it
> being loaded.
The "MII" ioctl calls allow this. You can set
the autonegotiation advertised capabilities
force the speed and duplex
(note that not all drivers correctly implement this: the driver
must look at the data written to the control register)
My drivers also implement related ioctl()
set the message level (generic)
set driver-specific parameters for some NICs
(multicast_filter_limit, rx_copybreak, multicast filter limit)
> I found that ifconfig can pass some information to the
> driver through (*set_config). Is it ok to use it? Also what is the
> member ifmap.port for? Is this the thing I can use for PHY selection?
That interface was implemented about a decade ago, and should have been
deleted long ago. Its implementation was flawed from the start,
although the basic idea was OK for the time: ISA wasn't there were
almost no transceiver options and no transceiver management information
was available.
The MII management interface isn't perfect (1), but it's a very widely
used standard.
(1) The MII management registers do not directly consider 10base2 and AUI,
but those can be cleanly added as extensions. The issue is that
they didn't define bits for Gb speed in the (available!) extension
registers #7-15. Any new Linux interface should consider 10Gb
transceiver management, and odd/variable-speed wireless interfaces.
--
Donald Becker becker@scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210 Scyld Beowulf cluster system
Annapolis MD 21403 410-990-9993
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