Re: wireless device and udev

[Stephen Hemminger <shemminger@vyatta.com>]

On Tue, 8 Dec 2009 09:29:40 -0500
"John W. Linville" <linville@tuxdriver.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 07, 2009 at 05:26:16PM -0800, Stephen Hemminger wrote:
> > The default udev persistent network rules based on hardware mac id doesn't
> > work well when multiple SSID's are created on an access-point.  The command
> >  iw phy phy0 interface add wlan1 type managed
> > 
> > is supposed to make a device name wlan1, but udev sees that it has the same
> > mac address as wlan0 and gets confused leaving the device named wlan1_rename
> > 
> > It looks like wlanX is breaking assumptions of existing udev persistent network
> > device name generation rules.  Perhaps there needs to be special case for wlanX
> > devices?
> 
> Yes, probably so.  But what would it be?  Factoring-in SSID is clearly
> not right for the usual case (i.e. one interface on a mobile device).
> I'm not sure what else one could use as a key.
> 
> What does udev do for bridge, bond, or vlan devices?  Don't those
> share MAC addresses with the underlying physical device?
> 
> John

At least on ubuntu/debian the name whitelist is:


# device name whitelist
KERNEL!="eth*|ath*|wlan*[0-9]|msh*|ra*|sta*|ctc*|lcs*|hsi*", GOTO="persistent_net_generator_end"

So bond or bridge don't match and don't get tampered with.

The problem is that wlan* device names are used for both hardware and virtual
devices.  Udev scripts can be fixed "do the right thing" but there is not sufficient
information for the script to decide how to attach persistent name.
What values from sysfs (ie attributes) should script be using?  This probably
means that additional attributes needed to be added to wireless device infrastructure
in kernel.