title: low level ethernet driver to read bits off phy layer
body: <p>Is it possible to read the bits directly off the physical ethernet connection interface from a standard computer ethernet interface?</p>
  
  <p>e.g., suppose I want to use the ethernet jack of a laptop as a differential logic probe(using a standard ethernet cable). Could I just potentially write a driver to get at the bits or is there a limit to how low a driver can go?</p>
  
  <p>Essentially does the physical layer just send the bit stream to the device driver or does it do any decoding which will effect the interpretation of the bits or cause the device to malfunction(such using a different encoding scheme).</p>
  
  <p>I guess what it boils down to, is, can we use the ethernet port as any standard digital differential communications link by writing a suitable driver or are we limited to the the ieee spec(8b/10b, etc...).</p>