MII-less network card support

[Tom Parker <palfrey tevp net>]

One of the machines I'm on has a 3com 3c940 onboard ethernet using the 
sk98lin driver. Now, the card apparently has MII support, but the linux 
driver doesn't support it, not even with either 2.6.10 or the card 
manufacturer's supplied driver. I know from some googling that it's 
there on the FreeBSD driver, but effectively it doesn't have one that I 
can get at. Net result of this is running NetworkManager right now 
(latest CVS) does the following:

NetworkManager: starting...
NetworkManager: eth0: Driver support level is fully-supported
NetworkManager: SIOCGMIIPHY on eth0 failed: Bad address
NetworkManager: nm_device_new(): waiting for device's worker thread to 
start.
NetworkManager: nm_device_new(): device's worker thread started, continuing.
NetworkManager: Adding device 'eth0' (wired) to our list.

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..

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

Tom
--
palfrey tevp net - http://tevp.net
Illegitimus non carborundum