On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 14:12, Aleksandr Rybalko <ra...@ddteam.net> wrote:

I don't understand why this is desirable in practice. It's a nice theory, but it falls down when one thinks in depth about how Ethernet interfaces are used and administered vs. how switches are used and administered. What should media report? What should media changes do? What is link status? Do you show the CPU-to-switch port, or all switch ports?

are a lot of switches out there that don't look or act much like MII-driven PHYs, but which are connected over MDIO, as I've tried to stress before. I hope there will be as much separation between the MII work that is being done and the switch work that is being done as possible. I think anything else will prove rapidly-obsolete and perhaps even obstructive as soon as anyone seeks to add support for more switch chipsets to FreeBSD.

I suppose the most likely reality, though, is that people simply won't add switch support to FreeBSD, and will administer them out-of-band from userland, using gross kernel shims. That is probably true whether any of the currently-outstanding work is committed or not, unfortunately :( I just hope we'll end up with something flexible enough, broad enough in applicability, narrow enough in requirements, etc., that we'll have feature-rich support for a few chipsets in tree that work in sufficiently-different manners that they can be models for other drivers in the future.