Subject: Re: Network media selection & documentation
To: None <Havard.Eidnes@runit.sintef.no>
From: David Brownlee <abs@anim.dreamworks.com>
List: current-users
Date: 08/03/1997 12:17:26
=09You should really submit a PR - if you have the time you can
=09submit patches for the driver manpages you know to be wrong (and
=09for the ifconfig manpage), which would help! :)

=09=09David/abs

On Sun, 3 Aug 1997 Havard.Eidnes@runit.sintef.no wrote:

> Hi,
>=20
> I notice that quite a few of the network drivers in /sys/dev/isa
> and /sys/dev/pci don't include <net/if_media.h>, and I presume
> this means they still use the link0/link1 flags to select the
> appropriate media port (?).  Or are all the remaining ones either
> single-port cards or unable to do port selection in software?
>=20
> One other thing which bugs me in this area is that it's currently
> a little difficult to get at what exact strings to use together
> with the ifconfig media option -- the man page for ifconfig
> simply points onwards to the man pages for the individual
> drivers.  It would really be nice if e.g. all ethernet drivers
> used the same keywords for the same media options, and ensuring
> this consistency is a bit hard if the options are documented
> multiple places.
>=20
> Besides, in NetBSD-current as of about a month ago very few of
> the individual ethernet driver man pages contain the list of
> strings to use with the ifconfig media selection option.  On top
> of that I find that at least the man page for the "ep" driver to
> be somewhat confusing (in that it first documents the informative
> strings printed by the driver instead of the options you can give
> to ifconfig media) or possibly misleading (from a brief
> inspection of the code it appears that "10base2" isn't a valid
> media option, but "bnc" is).
>=20
> Besides, a few man pages for ethernet device drivers are what I
> would characterize as a bit "thin", in that they mention nothing
> about the ifconfig media option (e.g. whether media selection is
> supported at all, and whether it's done via link0/link1 or the
> media option).  Of note here is the "le" and the "ed" man pages.
>=20
> It would be really nice if someone would brush up this before
> 1.3 goes out the door...
>=20
> - H=E5vard
>=20