`ifconfig` isn't showing stats for an alx gigabit card

Question

So I just setup conky on my arch box for monitoring various stats on the desktop, and I'm having a small problem. The relevant text in my conky config:

down $alignr ${downspeedf enp9s0} kb/s - ${totaldown enp9s0}
up $alignr ${upspeedf enp9s0} kb/s - ${totalup enp9s0}

where enp9s0 is my gigabit wired connection. I noticed that conky is always showing zeroes though for up/down speeds and totals for just this interface. I have another two lines in the config that do the same thing for my wireless interface (wlp7s0) and it works fine.

To see what's happening, I checked the output of ifconfig and it's showing zeroes for everything:

enp9s0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        inet 192.168.1.21  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 192.168.1.255
        inet6 fe80::7a45:c4ff:feb7:4471  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>
        ether -----------------  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 0  bytes 0 (0.0 B)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0
        device interrupt 17 

But it's showing stats as normal for my wireless interface:

wlp7s0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
        inet 192.168.1.20  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 192.168.1.255
        inet6 fe80::86a6:c8ff:feaf:85c5  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>
        ether ----------------  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
        RX packets 649  bytes 207876 (203.0 KiB)
        RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
        TX packets 119  bytes 56765 (55.4 KiB)
        TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

Relevant lsmod lines:

alx                    27461  0 
mdio                    3525  1 alx

Relevant lspci -vv:

09:00.0 Ethernet controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR8161 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 10)
    Subsystem: Dell Device 057e
    Control: I/O+ Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx-
    Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
    Latency: 0, Cache Line Size: 64 bytes
    Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 49
    Region 0: Memory at f7800000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256K]
    Region 2: I/O ports at d000 [size=128]
    Capabilities: <access denied>
    Kernel driver in use: alx
    Kernel modules: alx

Does anyone know what's going on? It's not a crippling issue - internet access works just fine - it just doesn't seem to be measuring stats as it does with my wireless interface.

EDIT: I've disabled the wireless interface to make sure it wasn't just using wireless over wired (I'm not exactly versed in how linux manages multiple network interfaces) and it still wasn't showing any stats when using the wired interface solely even though I still had internet access.

Answer 1

I could not find a way to fix ifconfig, but I used nstat and some clever awk computations in my conky script to achieve the same thing. So, instead of using "${downspeed eth0}/s" to obtain your download speed for eth0, you could use the following one-liner:

${execi 1 /sbin/nstat | grep -i IpExtInOctets | awk '{if($2>1024*1024){mb=$2/1024/1024;printf "%.2F MB", mb} else if($2>1024){kb=$2/1024;printf "%.2F KB", kb} else {printf "%d B", $2}}' }/s

You have to use execi with 1 second intervals. nstat shows the difference in bytes from its previous run. If you want to run it in longer than 1 sec intervals you may want to divide your result in awk to that number of seconds so you have an average.

For upload, use the IpExtOutOctets line from nstat. You can adapt this to your needs. Please remember that it will show all traffic in and out, not just for a specific interface. But I presume you only have one network interface, I have only one on my desktop PC. For multiple interfaces a different solution may be required.

UPDATE: however, be careful, running the command once for incoming then for outgoing immediately after the first one will show you zero for outgoing. Maybe some "sleep" commands here-and-there will fix this.

UPDATE2: here is how I solved the problem of showing both download and upload spedd in two differen commands and still about right. Adaptations to graphs and charts are needed, but for text only you can try this:

${goto 630}${font sansation:size=10,weight:bold}${color5} \
${texeci 2 /sbin/nstat | grep -i IpExtInOctets | awk '{if($2>1024*1024){mb=$2/1024/1024;printf "%.2F MB", mb} else if($2>1024){kb=$2/1024;printf "%.2F KB", kb} else {printf "%d B", $2}}' }/s \
${alignr 1}${color6} \
${texeci 2 sleep 1 && /sbin/nstat | grep -i IpExtOutOctets | awk '{if($2>1024*1024){mb=$2/1024/1024;printf "%.2F MB", mb} else if($2>1024){kb=$2/1024;printf "%.2F KB", kb} else {printf "%d B", $2}}' }/s

UPDATE: Or you could take both values at once and format them with awk for output.

U/D: ${execi 1 /sbin/nstat | grep -A1 -i IpExtInOctets | awk '{if($2>1024*1024){mb=$2/1024/1024;printf "%.2F MB/s ", mb} else if($2>1024){kb=$2/1024;printf "%.2F KB/s ", kb} else {printf "%d  B/s ", $2}}'}