From: James Ketrenos <redacted>
Date: Thu, 09 Jun 2005 16:01:30 -0500

The ipw2100 originally postponed doing any initialization until open was
called.  The problem at that time was that distributions were crafted to
rely on link detection (I believe via ethtoolop's get_link) before they
would bring the interface up.

Yes, I see, and that does work for most ethernet devices.
I noticed that Debian's 3.1 installer used this to determine
which ethernet device it should use as the default in it's
network device dialogue.

One idea, returning true for get_link when the device is down, may not
be a bad idea for the wireless case.