From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Marcel Holtmann Subject: Creating an Ethernet subtype setting Date: Thu, 26 Mar 2009 13:41:58 +0100 Message-ID: <1238071318.8206.18.camel@localhost.localdomain> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit To: netdev@vger.kernel.org Return-path: Received: from senator.holtmann.net ([87.106.208.187]:47430 "EHLO mail.holtmann.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1757472AbZC1DFZ (ORCPT ); Fri, 27 Mar 2009 23:05:25 -0400 Received: from [192.168.163.172] (S0106001cf062885c.vc.shawcable.net [24.82.150.230]) by mail.holtmann.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0F8C58B45E for ; Sat, 28 Mar 2009 04:05:27 +0100 (CET) Sender: netdev-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: Hi guys, so we have more and more subsystem that expose themselves as Ethernet networking devices and it really becomes hard to identify them in an easy way. For example WiFi has been an Ethernet device since a long time now and distinguishing between Ethernet and WiFi is not that hard since we have the good old WEXT ioctls to identify WiFi devices. However with WiMAX, Bluetooth, GSM/CDMA modems and even Ethernet bridge devices, it would be nice to have an easy way to identify them. Since it has become a mess for laptops that include 4 or more different technologies. For most of these Ethernet devices, we have to either connect first or authenticate or do something via a control channel to make them work. So it would be nice to have an easy way to identify them. I was thinking about doing this on a per driver or subsystem level and just setting a subtype value that is Linux specific. We could then expose this via sysfs and HAL, DeviceKit and udev could use it to annotate these devices correctly. Is this is a good idea or totally stupid and should be done better on a different level? Regards Marcel