Re: MII-less network card support

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 26 Jan 2005, Tom Parker wrote:
> And then it just sits there and does nothing until I get annoyed and 
> press Ctrl-C. If we have an MII-less link, then we need another way to 
> be able to determine whether it's alive. One option that comes to mind 
> is opening up a raw socket and listening for incoming ethernet frames - 
> if we see one, then the interface is alive..

Yes, I believe that I default to FALSE link state and then update it only 
when HAL updates the link, which would be never if the driver doesn't 
support netlink sockets or doesn't know the hardware (3c509 driver has 
really spotty link support too, only two cards).

> Unless anyone has any better ideas, I'm going to have a go at this 
> probably over this weekend.

That would be great.  I'm not quite sure how to fit this in, perhaps we 
need to add this into the "wired" device activation process and wait for 
10s or so for a frame before continuing or failing.  Thoughts?

Dan