At 10:38 PM -0500 1/14/05, Allen Briggs wrote:
>$ wtf mii
>mii: mii (4) - IEEE 802.3 Media Independent Interface network bus

The "bus" part didn't sink in.

>There are a number of ways that the MAC can talk to the physical
>ethernet bus.  MII tries to standardize the interconnection so
>that, in theory, the same PHY can be used with a range of MACs (or
>vice versa).  In many cases these days, even integrated chips will
>use a MAC <-> MII <-> PHY structure on a single core.  There are
>some variants like GMII and RGMII for gig-e, too.

So I got the generic software approach right :-) Since my Asante
FriendlyEthernet 696 card uses sip*, which gets nsphyter* attached to it, I
wasn't thinking of it as a hardware approach in that I was thinking of the
card as a "PCI" device/interface.

>With an MII and PHY attachment, the software interface for probing
>and configuring the media should be the same, even if the hardware
>is different.  But there are some quirks in different PHY
>implementations, so you can't always use 'ukphy' (unknown/generic
>PHY) or the equivalent 'gentbi' (generic 10-bit interface) for fiber.

I doubt MII was implemented for mc and bmac. I don't recall having come
across this concept in Apple documentation, but that's by no means
comprehensive.

tim