From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Stephen Hemminger Subject: Re: [PATCH] Add firmware label support to iproute2 Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:16:46 -0700 Message-ID: <20100825171646.3d40b721@nehalam> References: <20100812173537.GA29784@auslistsprd01.us.dell.com> <20100812141240.417949e2@s6510> <20100818144124.33a72453@nehalam> <20100819213314.GA26135@auslistsprd01.us.dell.com> <20100819145308.0fa08522@nehalam> <20100825220323.GA12671@auslistsprd01.us.dell.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Narendra_K@Dell.com, netdev@vger.kernel.org, Charles_Rose@Dell.com, Jordan_Hargrave@Dell.com, linux-pci@vger.kernel.org To: Matt Domsch Return-path: In-Reply-To: <20100825220323.GA12671@auslistsprd01.us.dell.com> Sender: linux-pci-owner@vger.kernel.org List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org On Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:03:23 -0500 Matt Domsch wrote: > On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 02:53:08PM -0700, Stephen Hemminger wrote: > > On Thu, 19 Aug 2010 16:33:14 -0500 > > Matt Domsch wrote: > > > > > On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 02:41:24PM -0700, Stephen Hemminger wrote: > > > > The netdev_alias_to_kernelname should only happen after normal lookup failed. > > > > > > Stephen, can you enlighten me as to the "right" way to do interface > > > name lookups? While I can still find examples of parsing > > > /proc/net/dev, or globbing /sys/class/net/*, I expect these aren't the > > > preferred method anymore. Your own iproute2 suite uses RTM_GETLINK > > > netlink calls, though for the seeming simple case of "give me a list of all > > > interfaces", your path through there is far more capable (and > > > complex) than I would hope to need. > > > > There is no magic right way. We have to support multiple interfaces. > > I am really concerned that all this alias stuff will turn into a > > disaster when there are 10,000 interfaces (Vlans). The kernel has > > lots of tables and hashes to handle this but if the utilities > > are doing a dumb scan of all names it will not work. > Is it really a good idea to have to change every utility that could alter network devices? There is iproute2, iputils, tcpdump, wireshark, quagga, snmp, ... Many of the utilities come from a BSD world, and will be less likely to accept some Linux specific wart. I have lost faith in this library wrapper support everywhere method. Let's just keep the firmware stuff in udev. If the user wants to have a policy that renames device from eth0 to "Embedded BIOS LAN1" then do it in udev. Or if you want to keep the ethX naming convention and stuff the firmware label into ifAlias or other sysfs field so it can be displayed that will be not a big issue.