On Wed, 28 May 2008 20:45:18 -0500 James Cammarata [off-list ref] wrote:

I had originally submitted this ability as a patch to procfs, and
general consensus was that it seemed "hackish" to do it that way.  It
was suggested that it be implemented as a feature of ethtool, so I 
thought I'd take on the challenge and add it that way.

I've laid the groundwork here, and added the ability to two of the 
drivers for which I have hardware to test on (e1000 and pcnet32).  I 
also added the code required to call this functionality to the ethtool 
code base, and have been using that to test my changes (using -z as the 
flag to ethtool for clearing stats for now).

If this is an acceptable start, I will gladly start working on adding 
this to as many drivers as possible (we do have some bnx2 hardware, 
though I'm not sure if it's available for testing).

Some other sys-admins have mentioned to me that ethtool doesn't work 
sometimes and they fall back to using mii-tool to configure interfaces,
so I'd still like to have the procfs change implemented to accommodate 
that hardware, but I agree, this is a better way forward.

You didn't provide a reason from adding this feature to the kernel.

Many of the kernel's accounting accumulators cannot be reset.  We
handle that in userspace tools by using subtraction.