Re: LANANA: To Pending Device Number Registrants

Alexander Viro
2001-05-15T23:36:02Z

On Tue, 15 May 2001, David Brownell wrote:

> I suppose that for network interface names, some convention for
> interface ioctls would suffice to solve that "identify" step. PCI
> devices would return the slot_name, USB devices need something
> like a patch I posted to linux-usb-devel a few months back.

This is crap. For user tools (_especially_ for admin scripts) ioctls
are damn inconvenient. I don't have Perl or Python on the root fs.
And I don't need yet another binary lurking in /sbin, thank you
very much.

If you want to do it - do it right. Accessing /dev/eth/<n>/MAC
is trivial. Wanking with ioctls is not. And populating such tree
is as simple as it gets.