On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 5:34 PM, Rick Jones [off-list ref] wrote:

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Since this is a boolean it SHOULD go into ethtool_flags rather than
being a high level operation.

It could do, but I though ETHTOOL_{G,S}FLAGS were intended for
controlling offload features.

It just seems the number of hooks keeps growing which takes more space
and increases complexity.

Is there any complication/downside to using flags in the (un?)likely event
of wanting different flavors of loopback in the card?

The purpose of the patch is to stress / exercise the ingress/egress
path(s). So like Ben had suggested earlier to keep the loopback
implementation as near as possible to the host would streamline /
simplify the implementation & usage.

This is not a new patch and the earlier thread has an answer for this.
It's just that when I re-submitted this patch today, it went in as a
new patch! Here are the reference(s) the old thread -

http://marc.info/?l=linux-netdev&w=3&r=1&s=Allow+ethtool+to+set+interface&q=t

rick jones