Brandeburg, Jesse wrote:

Jeff Garzik wrote:

quoted

Kok, Auke wrote:

quoted

Deprecate mii-tool SIOCMIIREG ioctl. This ioctl is broken in e1000
and ethtool has this functionality in working order.

Signed-off-by: Jeff Kirsher <redacted>
Signed-off-by: Auke Kok <redacted>

This doesn't "deprecated" anything, it changes the ABI on a
user's machine by _removing_ ioctl handling code that used to be
there. 

What's broken, and what is needed to fix?  Perhaps e1000
should instead be limited to 10/100 networks/speeds?

mii-tool is broken because it doesn't understand GMII phys.  We ended up
having a mess of code trying to implement the shim layer to support the
PHY write ioctls, among others.
mii-tool always reports 100 Mbps link when you actually have 1Gbps link.
Using mii-tool to set options didn't work very well to begin with, so
rather than continue to dump time into a dead end, just remove the
incomplete/non-working code and force the user to use ethtool if they
want to do set operations. 

Mii-tool is already marked in its man page to be obsolete

<quote from RHEL4>
NOTE
       This program is obsolete. Valid  media  are  only  100baseT4,
100baseTx-FD,100baseTx-HD,  10baseT-FD  and
       10baseT-HD ethernet cards. For replacement check eth-tool.
</quote>

We intentionally left the read code in to not break any user space
programs that are using that IOCTL to read link status etc.  With some
recent improvements to ethtool, it has the exact same functionality as
mii-tool.

While I appreciate the "don't break user space" position, in this case
it never really worked right, and when it did work the user was just
lucky because they probably weren't getting what they wanted.

I'm dropping this patch from our stack, it seems (irony) that we might have 
some use for this ioctl after all and we need to re-evaluate what to do with 
it. It doesn't hurt (much) to leave it in there for now.

Jeff, I'll repost a summary of the changes I made to the queue on our gitserver 
in a second.

Cheers,

Auke