On Thu, 2012-04-12 at 09:51 -0700, Ben Greear wrote: > On 04/12/2012 09:42 AM, Florian Fainelli wrote: > > Hi, > > > > Le 04/12/12 18:32, greearb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx a écrit : > >> From: Ben Greear<greearb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > >> > >> The signal and noise are forced to be positive since ethtool > >> deals in unsigned 64-bit values and this number should be human > >> readable. This gives easy access to some of the data formerly > >> exposed in the deprecated /proc/net/wireless file. > > > > Uh, that's misleading, the signal and noise values are typically negative, so one needs to think about mentally adding a minus sign if he/she wants to > > understand it. Does not ethtool know about 32-bits signed integers? > > Ethtool stats only supports u64. I think it's easy enough for > humans or programs to add the negative sign. Can signal or noise > ever be > 0? If so, that could actually break something that depends > on flipping the value to negative.... So far as I can see, the ethtool stats were expected to be counters, which obviously cannot become negative (or fractional). Maybe it's time to define another command and string-set to cover other types of status information. The ethtool utility could ask for those typed statistics as well, so 'ethtool -S' would get all of them. 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-wireless" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
