Re: MII-less network card support

[David Zeuthen <davidz redhat com>]

On Wed, 2005-01-26 at 12:44 +0100, Tom Parker wrote:
> 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. 

sk98lin was making hald crash the box until I've changed to using the
carrier file in sysfs. Apparently because of a driver bug. My thinking
is that hald should export a property net.80203.can_detect_link that
is FALSE if, and only if, we cannot read the carrier file.

<snip>

> 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..

This sounds like a great idea to do in NM, if net.80203.can_detect_link
is FALSE.

David