------- Comment From [email protected] 2017-06-22 12:46 EDT-------
(In reply to comment #21)
> As far as I know, and I would like IBM to be explicit about it as well, but
> iproute2 does not provide any ethernet device manipulation stuff. That's
> what ethtool provides -- modifying device settings (presumably to workaround
> firmware bugs or other such, during bringup).

Exactly this Nish.

ethtool is a modern generic approach to deal with NICs. One can
enable/disable features like TSO/GSO/GRO, dump adapter status/registers,
perform tests, show NIC statistics and a variety of configurations.
iproute2 is focused on generic IP stack handling, whereas ethtool focus
on NICs.

Also, drivers can define command interfaces, allowing ethtool to perform
specific activities. Like i40e (the reason of this request for
Canonical): they changed their RX path, and kept the legacy (and stable)
RX code on driver, to be switched via ethtool.

If you take a look in netdev kernel list, you'll see almost all debugfs
parameter proposals from drivers are criticized in favor of using
ethtool approaches, like i40e did. It is a *really* important/essential
tool to manage network cards.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1690228

Title:
  Make ethtool installed by default in Ubuntu

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