Sorry for being late to this thread.
> It would be useful to have some additional information about the property
> (for example, a pointer to the ieee802.3(5) man page for adv_autoneg_cap),
> but clearly, there is not much room left in the output above, if we
> assume the standard 80 char window. Putting the description in its own
> line (and interspersing that above) is also not likely to
> be universally appealing.
>
> What would be a good way of providing additional description? A verbose
> flag passed to dladm (such as the -v used for netstat)? A new flag/argument
> to dladm? Thoughts?
My original thinking (when coming up with show-linkprop for WiFi) was that
we could add additional (optional) fields for whatever information we
wanted. For instance, we could have a DESC field that gives a short
description of the property, or whatever. The most commonly useful fields
should be shown by default, and the rest should be available via "-o all".
If there's general consensus that the convenience of "-v" justifies having
it as an alias for "-o all", that seems fine to me.
I would strongly advise against revising show-linkprop to have multi-line
output, as it doesn't lend itself to having a parseable (-p) equivalent,
and ifconfig will forever be a reminder of what happens when you have
useful information that cannot be easily or portably parsed.
Another part of the original thinking was that properties should be
reserved for things that are generally off the beaten path and do not lend
themselves to being tied to more first-class operations. For instance,
you'll note that wificonfig had 15 WiFi properties, whereas dladm has only
four (and some of those are generic). For instance, with wificonfig,
"createibss" is a property, whereas with dladm it is an option to
connect-wifi (which also makes it obvious when it will be applied).
All that said, please don't feel constrained by what's there right now --
Nevada hasn't shipped so we can change any of this if we think we can
build something better.
> LINK PROPERTY VALUE DEFAULT POSSIBLE
>
> bge1 zone -- -- --
>
> bge1 link_duplex full full full, half, none
> bge1 link_speed 1000 1000 10, 1000
> bge1 link_status up up up, down
> bge1 adv_autoneg_cap 1 1 0, 1
> bge1 default_mtu 9000 1500 0 - 9000
A couple of asides on the above:
* The reason for making some of the existing WiFi properties like
"speed" generic was so that they could be reused for other link
types. If we think the name "link_speed" is preferable (I understand
the justification, but the redundancy in the name is irritating), it
would be nice to rename the WiFi one to also be link_speed.
* As Darren noted, units would be useful. (Yes, we punted on that
with the WiFi "speed" property. But you can do better :-)
* I know there's precedent for it, but could we please lose "default_"?
* Does a writeable link_status make sense? And does it really have
a default?
--
meem
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