On Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:36:31 -0500
Matt Mackall [off-list ref] wrote:

On Thu, 2008-07-31 at 03:47 -0700, David Miller wrote:

quoted

I especially appreciate that you still haven't accepted the plain fact
that CONFIG_ETHTOOL needs to be selected by CONFIG_INET.

So far the following features have been mentioned as being critically
dependent on ethtool:

- bridging
- bonding
- LRO
- netfilter (really?)
- IPv6 (really?)

And yet every single one of these is currently a config option, so your
above statement is still looking awfully dubious. At this point I'd
suggest that you've painted yourself into a corner where all these
options must also actually be mandatory, but I'm afraid you might
secretly want to do that anyway.

quoted

I definitely see the next consequence of the CONFIG_ETHTOOL stuff, and
that's a set of ifdef'ola in all the drivers to config out the
per-driver ethtool support code.

If someone shows up with such a patch for a Xylinx or ARM SOC device,
you probably should take it. If the patch is instead for a 10Gb PCIe
device, I suggest you don't. (At least not until that sort of thing
becomes standard embedded kit.)

I have no problem with an embedded CONFIG_ETHTOOL that normal users
can ignore. Just don't expect the network developers to fix things
that are broken when CONFIG_ETHTOOL is not enabled. I.e if embedded
build is broken it is your problem.