Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 140062
tg3 reports incorrect information to mii-tool
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:07:05 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040929 Description of problem: mii-tool does not return the correct value when querying the Broadcom BCM5701-based PCI Gigabit 1000Base-SX card. It appears the tg3 driver needs to fix mii-tool support or remove mii-tool support since ethtool reports the correct value. mii-tool reports 10BaseT while ethtool reports 1000Mbps. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.4.21-20.EL How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install HP Gigabit NIC: Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme BCM5701 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 15) Subsystem: Compaq Computer Corporation NC6770 Gigabit Server Adapter (PCI-X, 1000-SX) 2. mii-tool eth2 3. ethtool eth2 Actual Results: mii-tool returns: eth0: 10 Mbit, half duplex, link ok ethtool returns: Settings for eth0: Supported ports: [ FIBRE ] Supported link modes: 1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full Supports auto-negotiation: Yes Advertised link modes: 1000baseT/Half 1000baseT/Full Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes Speed: 1000Mb/s Duplex: Full Port: Twisted Pair PHYAD: 1 Transceiver: internal Auto-negotiation: on Supports Wake-on: g Wake-on: d Current message level: 0x000000ff (255) Link detected: yes Expected Results: mii-tool should return: 1000Mbit, full duplex, link ok Additional info: This happens on kernel 2.4.21-9.ELsmp and 2.4.21-20.ELsmp.
When a fibre interface is present, we return -EOPNOTSUPP for the ioctls that mii-tool uses. If mii-tool isn't handling that error condition correctly, then that is what needs to be fixed.
How can I verify mii-tool is the culprit? Should this bug get assigned to the mii-tool developer?
Assigning to owner of net-tools package for appropriate action...
mii-tool is obsolete and doesn't know about gigabit NICs. So I suggest using ethtool while ethtool is heading to fully substitute mii-tool. (new version of net-tools in fc3 has a note in mii-tool(8) about this)
If mii-tool were to echo "This program does not return proper information from Gigabit adapters; please use ethtool", that would be acceptable. Currently, mii-tool is broken on RHEL 3 because it returns bogus information. If it returned an error message when querying Gigabit adapters, that would be fine; returning bogus information saying 10mbs is a bug and I believe it should be fixed.
Red Hat support / prod mgmt claims mii-tool will not be fixed. Closing this bug.