Overview of NIC Driver Properties

NIC driver properties that are configurable by using the dladm command fall into one of two categories:

• Public properties that can be applied to any driver of the given media type such as link speed, autonegotiation for Ethernet, or the MTU size that can be applied to all data-link drivers.

• Private properties that are particular to a certain subset of drivers for a given media type. These properties can be specific to that subset because they are closely related either to the hardware that is associated with the driver or to the details of the driver implementation itself, such as debugging-related tunables.

Properties of a NIC driver are typically set with default values. However, certain networking scenarios might require you to change specific property settings of a NIC. These property settings can be either public or private properties. For example, a NIC might be communicating with an old switch that does not properly perform autonegotiation. Or, a switch might have been configured to support Jumbo frames. Or, driver specific properties that regulate packet transmission or packet receiving might need to be modified for the given driver. In this Solaris release, all of these settings can now be reset by a single administrative tool, dladm.