On Sun, Jun 07, 2020 at 05:59:39PM +0300, Amit Cohen wrote:
Currently, drivers can only tell whether the link is up/down using LINKSTATE_GET, but no additional information is given.
Add attributes to LINKSTATE_GET command in order to allow drivers to expose the user more information in addition to link state to ease the debug process, for example, reason for link down state.
Extended state consists of two attributes - ext_state and ext_substate. The idea is to avoid 'vendor specific' states in order to prevent drivers to use specific ext_state that can be in the future common ext_state.
The substates allows drivers to add more information to the common ext_state. For example, vendor can expose 'Autoneg failure' as ext_state and add 'No partner detected during force mode' as ext_substate.
If a driver cannot pinpoint the extended state with the substate accuracy, it is free to expose only the extended state and omit the substate attribute.
Maybe it is hiding somewhere, but shoudn't there be a check to see if the interface is administratively up? I don't think the information returned here makes much sense if the interface is configured down.
Andrew