Re: e1000/ICH8LAN weirdness - no ethtool link until initially forced up

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Robin H. Johnson wrote:
On Tue, Nov 07, 2006 at 07:51:22AM -0800, Auke Kok wrote:
I think you should cc e1000 maintainers, and perhaps provide a patch....
I've read it and not come up with an answer due to some other issues at hand. E1000 hardware works differently and this has been asked before, but the cards itself are in low power state when down. Changing this to bring up the link would make the card start to consume lots more power, which would automatically suck enormously for anyone using a laptop.

Unfortunately, we have no way to distinguish directly between mobile and non-mobile adapters, since they are usually the same.

Your application should really `ifconfig up` the device before checking for link.
Actually pushing the link up in userspace doesn't specifically help my
applications, as I care about actual link status (as reported by
ethtool).

technically the link is already up if the cable is inserted and connected. doing an `ifconfig up` doesn't change that. If the link is down then this powers up the PHY so we can read the link status.

Is there no way to keep the link status correct (within 0.5 seconds),
without bringing the card to full power? Maybe a timer that fires a
proper check (with the power implications).

no, not that I know of.

Would a patch that adds a modparam (not enabled by default) running the
behavior I'm after, be acceptable, so the e1000 driver can act identical
to all of the other drivers?

I bet that all drivers work fine if you `ifconfig up` them. What happens if other NIC drivers implement similar powersaving methods and start working the same?

Cheers,

Auke

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