Subject: Re: mii-tool gigabit support.

From: David Acker <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2006 09:00:51 -0400

Stephen Hemminger wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Sep 2006 17:55:34 -0400
> Jeff Garzik <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
>> Stephen Hemminger wrote:
>>> The mii-tool utility seems to be abandoned and unmaintained?
>>>
>>> Here is a version that does standard 1000baseT support.
>>> 	http://developer.osdl.org/shemminger/prototypes/mii-tool.tar.bz2
>> Not really.  I would rather leave it as-is, and deprecate it in favor of 
>> ethtool.
>>
> 
> It does make a handy debug tool when driver isn't doing MII correctly.
> 

mii-tool supports some things that ethtool does not.  mii-tool -A lets 
you set the advertised speeds and can include a list of speeds.  The 
closest ethtool seems to have is ethtool -s but that seems to just set 
the advertised speed to a single value only.

We have instances where we want to limit the link of the ethernet port 
to no higher then 10 Mbps full duplex but also advertise support for 
half duplex.

With mii-tool we can do the command below and work with a half duplex 
hub and a full duplex switch.
mii-tool -A 10baseT-FD,10baseT-HD eth0

Meanwhile if I use ethtool like the command below I will not work with a 
half duplex only hub.
ethtool -s eth0 speed 10 duplex full autoneg on

Perhaps the "speed" part of ethtool -s should take a list of speeds like 
mii-tool does.

-Ack