Re: [patch 1/7] net_device list cleanup: core

[Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>]

On Tue, Jul 04, 2006 at 11:24:05AM +0400, Andrey Savochkin wrote:
> > Yes, it's a little more work as you need to audit all drivers to see what
> > they are doing and find suitable abstractions but it's a must have that
> > should have been done a lot earlier.
> 
> Hiding dev_base_head can be done by converting first_netdev/next_netdev into
> functions and implementing for_each_netdev loop through them.
> 
> Or are you talking about abstractions like functions
> for_each_netdev/find_netdev with callbacks?

an for_each_netdev with a callback makes sense and gives a cleaner
abstraction, yes.  I don't think you should need a callback for the lookup
structure.

> Do you think that hiding the list internals is worth the additional
> complexity and substantial increase of the patch size?

Yes, absolutely.  We've converted scsi hosts and devices from a model
where drivers could directly access the list to strict iterators in the
2.5 series.  It's quite a lot of work as you have to understand what
the drivers actually do (and to at least 50% they were doing something
really stupid) and convert them to the right abstractions.