netplug [was Re: Automatically bringing ethernet interfaces up when the cableis connected]

[David Zeuthen]

On Mon, 2003-12-15 at 20:00, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-12-15 at 10:38, David Zeuthen wrote:
> 
> > This is actually, in part, what I'm trying to achieve with freedesktop
> > HAL. As you can see on this screenshot
> > 
> >  http://freedesktop.org/~david/hal-link-detection.png
> > 
> > a number of devices is showed, including network devices with ethernet
> > link detection.
> 
> What happens in the case where a wired card is plugged in without having
> a wire attached, or a wireless card with no nearby networks, and an
> event subsequently happens?  This isn't something that hotplug helps
> with.
> 

Well, as HAL isn't mature at all the only thing I presently do is to
monitor the MII registers, if available, as in mii-diag by Donald
Becker. Obviously this only works for ethernet.

I'm sure there are better ways to do this though, but my point was
really that it makes good sense to put all hardware dependent stuff,
like network link detection, in a hardware abstraction layer in a way
that is OS-independent way such that the desktop environments can use it
without resorting to #ifdef-hell.

Cheers,
David