Re: MII-less network card support

[David Zeuthen <davidz redhat com>]

On Mon, 2005-01-31 at 12:54 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:
> 2.6.10 has a
> new "carrier" file in sysfs (/sys/class/net/<interface>/carrier) that is
> supposed to expose the drivers carrier state, but I have no idea what it
> says when the driver doesn't actually support link-detection.
> 

Then you can't read from the file as described here

 http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2005-January/001750.html

Note that hal now exports the boolean net.80203.can_detect_link which
is set to TRUE when we cannot read from that file.

> Technically no, we shouldn't be using MII registers directly since lack
> of MII doesn't mean no link checking (and MII calls randomly crash
> certain network cards), but unless we figure out another way to
> determine whether or not cards support this capability, we have no
> better choice...
> 

Just use net.80203.can_detect_link. Assume it's TRUE if you cannot
find the property as this is something I've just put into the 0.4.x
series (should be in Fedora Rawhide). But I guess NM should roll over
to using dbus 0.30 and hal 0.5.x in a few weeks when that is baked.

David