[En-Nut-Discussion] Ethernet drivers

[Thiago A. Corrêa]

Hi,

   I'm giving the MACB driver on AVR32 a shot, and I've noticed that
all ethernet drivers wait for the link status to go up before
returning from NutDeviceRegister, and in some cases, like the
at91_emac, after a timeout, it simply fails, failling
NutDeviceRegister, and leaving it unaccessible until a reset for all
of the sample applications.

  That's not very nice, and I would like to use the link interrupt
feature to setup the link at a later stage, so it can go up, down and
even change properties (from 10 half to 100 full duplex for instance)
which is also not supported in the current drivers.

   I found that there is a header include/net/if.h that contains:
/*!
 * \name Interface Link State
 */
/*@{*/
#define LINK_STATE_UNKNOWN  0   /* Link invalid/unknown. */
#define LINK_STATE_DOWN     1   /* Link is down. */
#define LINK_STATE_UP       2   /* Link is up. */
/*@}*/

   Where were those defines supposed to be used? I can't find anywere.
At first I thought I would use the if_mask field, but on that same
file, I can see that it's meant for something else.

  Any advice?

Thanks,
   Thiago A. Correa