From: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 14:48:12 -0700

But I do think we should see some evidence that people are actually
using CONFIG_ETHTOOL=n in real setups.

Heaven help them if they want to debug any real problems that
might involve checksumming, TSO, and other offload features.
Heaven help them if they want to probe the driver or firmware
version of the card they are using.

I'm sure you can find someone who runs with CONFIG_STAND_ON_MY_HEAD=y
but that doesn't mean that supporting such an option upstream makes
any sense.

We spent years getting rid of the per-driver module parameters to
configure these things.  And now folks want to remove the common
infrastructure we created to do it.

6K is peanuts compared to the per-driver code that implements these
facilities.