Well the first thing I'd say is that the realtek chipset's are terrible
if you really want performance. They don't do any packet header
processing or other tcp hardware offloading, causing your CPU to take
the brunt of the packet load (with gigabit this is bad).

I would recommend Broadcom or Intel based gigabit cards.

Regardless of this fact, mii-tool doesn't support reading out gigabit
link status. It'll give you a link up status with 100FD for 1000FD cards
linked at 1000FD with flow control enabled.

I know it at least reports on the broadcom and intel based cards with a
link up status.

Otherwise, I think you might need to find another tool to get real link
status out of a gigabit nic.

On Tue, 2005-02-15 at 09:32 +1000, Michael Mansour wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've just purchased some Netgear 1gigabit ethernet cards and to my 
> dissapointment mii-tool couldn't be used to query them, even though the linux 
> kernel has no issues with using them.
> 
> I run cluster software with SL303 which uses mii-tool to do link level 
> checking etc... so my question is, which 1gigabit cards work correctly with 
> SL303 and mii-tool? so that I get output similar to the following:
> 
> [root@anaconda root]# mii-tool
> eth0: negotiated 100baseTx-HD, link ok
> eth1: negotiated 100baseTx-HD, link ok
> SIOCGMIIPHY on 'eth2' failed: Operation not supported
> 
> note: eth2 is the Netgear card (which uses a Realtek chip), the other two are 
> just standard Realtek PCI cards.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Michael.