Per-interface polling(4) status

[Luigi Rizzo]

more or less i am fine with your proposed change.
I believe you could add something to state the capability of the 
hw/driver (polling-capable, like checksum-offloading).
For capabilities such as checksum offloading, 'xl' reports them
as 'options' rather than 'flags', but other capabilities such
as MULTICAST and SIMPLEX are instead reported as 'flags' 
(well you could think of MULTICAST as a capability that is always
enabled so it makes sense to report it as a 'flag').

Actual settings (PROMISC, UP, POLLING, NOARP) are always
reported as flags.

I'd love if we could sort out this confusion and have capabilities
clearly marked/reported in some ifconfig field (e.g. "options").
 
POLA would suggest to set IFF_POLLING by default on all drivers which
support it. You still need the global sysctl to enable it.
 
Finally, while you are at it (and before we branch 6.0), maybe you 
could store the 'IFF_CANTCHANGE' flags in a separate place from 
user-configured ones, so one wouldn't have to apply the mask all
the times.

	cheers
	luigi

On Sun, Apr 11, 2004 at 01:21:12AM +0300, Ruslan Ermilov wrote:
> Dear networkers,
> 
> Like I mumbled in another email, I've started working on a small
> project that (when done) will allow for a per-interface polling(4)
> status to be changed in run-time.  Attached is a proof of the
> concept patch, that currently has support for the dc(4) driver
> only (basically because I have this card plugged into my notebook).