Donald Becker wrote:

It was
  "If you need this capability for a RESEARCH PROJECT, you can buy this
  specific board and thus not need to modify the kernel or device
  driver. "

You can also find a few people that want to receive specific corrupted
packets, change the meaning of LEDs on a NIC, and do many other strange
things.  But we don't need a defined kernel interface for each one.

Just out of curiosity, what is the suggested manner for adding such
back-door hacks as this?  Maybe in a proc file system that the driver
implements?  It would be neat to see various driver-specific features
like this be implemented, and it would be even nicer if they followed
at least some general guideline for how to interface with the rest of
the world...

Improvement is what you can eliminate or simplify, not adding complexity.

Exposing new features can also be an improvement, though one does
not imply the other ;)

Ben

-- 
Ben Greear [off-list ref]       <Ben_Greear AT excite.com>
President of Candela Technologies Inc      http://www.candelatech.com
ScryMUD:  http://scry.wanfear.com     http://scry.wanfear.com/~greear