svn commit: r205024 - head/sys/net

[Juli Mallett]

On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 15:39, Qing Li <qingli at freebsd.org> wrote:
> I guess it's a good time to clean things up. The if_link_state code has been
> around for quite some time, either it be fully utilized or not be there at all.
> The inconsistency is the root cause.

Sure.  There is an increasing amount of stuff that network drivers are
expected to do, but they work without doing them.  It's easy to think
you have a functioning network driver and that you can get by without
adding support for media changes and link status reporting, etc.

> I will try going through these tonight and hopefully the fix all take a
> common approach.

If you can think of a way to add some invariants (warn the first time
a driver receives a packet without having ever set the link state,
make sure the media status callback sets the valid flag in the
request, etc) that would probably be very helpful for people who are
writing network drivers.  If I hadn't been following the threads about
your changes, I would have had to spend much longer fixing the Octeon
port's Ethernet driver, wondering why suddenly it broke and
instrumenting the routing code.  A printf would go a long way.

Juli.