Following on from my post on March 25^th regarding AIX Virtual Ethernet Link Status. It appears that the latest TL and SP for AIX 7.1 (TL3 SP3) allows an administrator to view the (VIOS SEA) physical link status from a virtual Ethernet adapter.

# oslevel -s

7100-03-03-1415

# chdev -l ent0 -a poll_uplink=yes –P

# shutdown –Fr

# entstat -d ent0 | grep PHY

        PHYS_LINK_UP

Using sdiff I compared the output from entstat –d (before and after I applied TL3 SP3).