On Mon, 25 Aug 2025 19:17:55 +0530 Naveen Mamindlapalli wrote:

-Statistics must persist across routine operations like bringing the interface
-down and up.
+Statistics are expected to persist across routine operations like bringing the

Please don't weaken the requirement. The requirements is what it is.

+interface down and up. This includes both standard interface statistics and
+driver-defined statistics reported via `ethtool -S`.

Rest of the paragraph looks good, but I think the preferred form of
quotations is double back ticks? Most of this doc doesn't comply but
let's stick to double when adding new stuff.

+However, this behavior is not always strictly followed, and some drivers do
+reset these counters to zero when the device is closed and reopened. This can
+lead to misinterpretation of network behavior by monitoring tools, such as
+SNMP, that expect monotonically increasing counters.
+
+Driver authors are expected to preserve statistics across interface down/up
+cycles to ensure consistent reporting and better integration with monitoring
+tools that consume these statistics.

This feels like too many words. How about:

Note that the following legacy drivers do not comply with this requirement
and cannot be fixed without breaking existing users:
 - driver1
 - driver2
 ...
-- 
pw-bot: cr