Raymond LI - Sun Microsystems - Beijing China wrote:
> Joost Mulders wrote:
>
>>> Could we introduce below property into Brussels while keeping current
>>> IEEE802.3 defination? Having a property named "ether-flow-ctrl", which has
>>> below possible values:
>>>
>>> ether-flow-ctrl = 0: Disable pause frame flow control
>>> ether-flow-ctrl = 1: Enable just Rx flow control
>>> ether-flow-ctrl = 2: Enable just Tx flow control
>>> ether-flow-ctrl = 3: Enable both Rx/Tx flow control
>>>
>>>
>> Interesting reading on this subject:
>> http://hardware.mcse.ms/message13052.html
>>
>> Flow control per direction is a far better concept than what we offer
>> now. I would love to see it implemented.
>>
>> Regards, Joost
>>
>>
> I think we need a friendly UI for pause setting, while keeping the
> ieee802.3 tunable as many as
> possible. I wonder some users may really tweak these value, isn't it?
>
The ieee802.3 values are *insane*. Largely because not only do normal
mortal users not understand them, but apparently neither do the driver
developers... I've found several inconsistent interpretations for them.
Compare the usage of bge versus ce versus eri to see what I mean.
We do not need to expose the MII bit values to userland via NDD. Some
of the insanity we can thank IEEE 802.3 for, since they apparently tried
hard to ensure backwards compatibility and minimize the number of bits
consumed in the MII registers.
What is really needed is way for users to tune a couple of values:
* do/don't (claim to) accept pause frames
* do/do not send pause frames
For older NICs, these values are tuned together. You may not have
control over whether pause frames are sent or not, in any case.
Its also important that users can see:
* which bits the peer is claiming support for, and
* the currently negotiated pause support
It might be worth looking at how other operating systems expose this to
administrators.
-- Garrett
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