Re: Naming devices

[Russell King <rmk@arm.linux.org.uk>]

On Mon, May 19, 2003 at 07:33:59AM +1000, Anton Blanchard wrote:
> I was wondering why we dont have a consistent way of printing a device
> location? If all drivers used the same thing, eg:

Isn't this what dev->bus_id in the device structure is supposed to be?
(which is supposed to be a unique bus ID on a particular bus type, in
the pci case, a PCI device.)

> Also the tendency of network drivers to print "eth0: foo" during
> initialisation is even more of a problem. If you get a bad card then you
> could end up reusing the eth0 name for a subsequent device, making
> pinpointing the problem card difficult. On top of that some drivers use
> dev->name between calling alloc_netdev() and register_netdev() so that
> you end up with error messages like "eth%d: failed".

Now that the point has been raised, it seems pretty obvious that
initialisation failures should report the BUS ID of the failing card,
not the logical name assigned by the system to that device which could
change.  Once the card is up and running, using the logical name becomes
meaningful - it's the identifier which user space uses to reference the
device.

-- 
Russell King (rmk@arm.linux.org.uk)                The developer of ARM Linux
             http://www.arm.linux.org.uk/personal/aboutme.html