The operstate of a device is initially IF_OPER_UNKNOWN and is updated
asynchronously by linkwatch after each change of carrier state
reported by the driver. The default carrier state of a net device is
on, and this will never be changed on drivers that do not support
carrier detection, thus the operstate remains IF_OPER_UNKNOWN.
For devices that do support carrier detection, the driver must set the
carrier state to off initially, then poll the hardware state when the
device is opened. However, we must not activate linkwatch for a
unregistered device, and commit b473001 ('net: Do not fire linkwatch
events until the device is registered.') ensured that we don't. But
this means that the operstate for many devices that support carrier
detection remains IF_OPER_UNKNOWN when it should be IF_OPER_DOWN.
The same issue exists with the dormant state.
The proper initialisation sequence, avoiding a race with opening of
the device, is:
rtnl_lock();
rc = register_netdevice(dev);
if (rc)
goto out_unlock;
netif_carrier_off(dev); /* or netif_dormant_on(dev) */
rtnl_unlock();
but it seems silly that this should have to be repeated in so many
drivers. Further, the operstate seen immediately after opening the
device may still be IF_OPER_UNKNOWN due to the asynchronous nature of
linkwatch.
Commit 22604c8 ('net: Fix for initial link state in 2.6.28') attempted
to fix this by setting the operstate synchronously, but it was
reverted as it could lead to deadlock.
This initialises the operstate synchronously at registration time
only.
Signed-off-by: Ben Hutchings <bhutchings@solarflare.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
8f4cccbbd9