Dale Ghent writes: > Take a driver such as bge or e1000g for example. These two drivers > support a ton of silicon parts that have quite varied feature sets > among. Some do jumbo, some don't. Some have various levels of off- > loading and checksumming, some none at all. It would be useful, I > would think, for an admin to know if a particular (offload) feature is > present on a particular chipset without trying to dig up the chipset's > docs, make sense of source code, or guess. Right now this area is sort > of like mystery meat.
That does sound useful, but I don't think it sounds like a configuration parameter. Perhaps a set of common kstats could be developed to 'advertise' certain internal but non-trivial features. (Almost by definition, these would likely be things that happen to be complicated enough that they're usually infested with bugs. :-/) > Extrapolating this into the future, who knows what other features lay > in wait when it comes to ethernet chipset one-upmanship... iscsi crap, > RDMA, and so on. All I'm saying is that info is good, even in read- > only form. It can take the sleuthing out of wondering what you've got > when you put in a new Intel PRO card or are wondering what exactly > your Nvidia chip is capable of. The fine line here would be between exporting administratively useful information versus exporting meaningless marketing trash. I think it'll be hard to avoid having this mechanism (whatever it might be) become a sewer main. -- James Carlson, Solaris Networking <james.d.carlson at sun.com> Sun Microsystems / 35 Network Drive 71.232W Vox +1 781 442 2084 MS UBUR02-212 / Burlington MA 01803-2757 42.496N Fax +1 781 442 1677
