Yes! This solution makes most sense, as Pause support is definitely on the MAC side.
I thought this was not allowed because I was following instructions from a stale copy of phy.txt -- I figured my copy was good because the "last update" date at the top of the master file was the same. (It is still 2008-04-08 -- see https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/networking/phy.txt) Thank you very much for your swift response. This whole issue has been very interesting to investigate. I'll take a look at Timur's cleanup and respect that approach as I repair the older copy of kernel that I am working with for this project.
