Re: Question: Etherenet Link Detection

[Tim Hockin]

> It's traditionally been defined as MII information, but that's
> awfully slow, so some Ethernet controllers make it available
> in a quicker manner.
> 
> ethtool might do this (http://sourceforge.net/projects/gkernel/);
> I don't know for sure.

The only interface to this is through MII, unless we want to add an ETHTOOL
style ioctl to get the link status.  This means, however, that every driver
that wants to report this needs to support at least a subset of ethtool
ioctls, which VERY FEW do.