On Nov 7, 11:19am, Havard Eidnes wrote:
}
} > AFAICT NetBSD only does proper NWAY negotiation if media is set to auto.
} 
} That is also my experience, and I thought that was sort of the norm
} elsewhere as well.

     There seems to be a mixture here.  Some do, some don't.  Since
hard coding isn't defined in the standard, systems and devices can do
whatever they want, so there is no telling what will happen.

} > This is a bug, and it should be fixed.
} 
} Well, Charles says "yes", so it must be true! ;-)  (Seriously, I trust
} his statement on this; I don't have that particular detailed knowledge
} to tell that myself, though.)

     I realise that Charles has contributed a great deal to NetBSD
(including apparently spending his own money to do trade show booths)
and obviously knows a great deal about operating systems, but does he
know enough about networking to be considered an authority in that
area?  Deferring to authority can be dangerous, especially if the
authority in question is not an authority in the area in question.

     Networking is one of my primary areas.  I dispute the idea that
NetBSD's behaviour is a bug.  However, I don't dispute the idea that it
may be less then optimal, which is reason enough to change things.
And, changing things could help with problems with invalid
configurations.  Of course, people should really learn what they are
doing before they muck with stuff.  However, lots of people don't, and
then they will blame anything but themselves.  If for no other reason
then appearance and reducing the number of bogus complaints, we should
probably make the change.  Of course, I have no idea just how much
control software has over the negotiation process.  The last time I
bashed on NICs was back in the days of 8 bit 10 Mbps half duplex cards
with coax connectors (i.e. Ethernet as originally defined).

}-- End of excerpt from Havard Eidnes