Alternative to ethtool on MontaVista embedded Linux

Question

I am running MontaVista Linux Professional Edition 3.1 on an embedded system. My version of this distribution doesn't seem to have ethtool available, and using mii-tool gives the following error:

SIOCGMIIPHY on 'eth0' failed: Operation not supported

Is there another alternative way to access the configuration options that ethtool provides?

Answer 1

With a recent enough kernel, you could have a look at

/sys/class/net/eth0/speed
/sys/class/net/eth0/duplex

Sometimes the dmesg output will show the information when the speed is negotiated. You may have to turn some verbose mode on in the NIC driver (see modinfo output on the module for what parameters (to be set in modprobe.conf or modules.conf) are supported).

If you're looking for other parameters like the offload parameters, the kernel API to retrieve them is called "ethtool" (SIOCETHTOOL ioctl), so I doubt there's any other utility to get it.

You should be able to compile ethtool easily though, there's no special dependency required.