Re: [PATCH 1/6] mac80211: allow no mac address until firmware load

[Michael Buesch <mb@bu3sch.de>]

On Monday 28 July 2008 15:57:45 Dan Williams wrote:
> > (What are the udev problems, btw?)
> 
> People seem to want persistent device names.  Since the kernel doesn't
> provide stable device/bus enumeration, there are udev hacks (see
> attached from Fedora 9) that read the MAC address of the card on
> hot-plug and then assign it to a cached device name so that every time I
> plug in my Netgear MA401 it gets "eth2".

Yeah well. But using a pseudo-random MAC as a base to build a persistent
naming scheme on sounds pretty fragile to me. ;)

I think cards that don't supply MAC early simply cannot support
a really working persistent naming scheme well. udev should probably
just enumerate eth0 - ethX as it sees the devices. That's as good
as mixing a numbering scheme into a pseudo MAC, IMO. And it's
less confusing and it pushes a lot of policy decisions into userspace.

-- 
Greetings Michael.