Re: [patch iproute2 1/6] iproute2: ipa: show switch id

[Jiri Pirko <jiri@resnulli.us>]

Thu, Dec 04, 2014 at 09:06:14PM CET, ebiederm@xmission.com wrote:
>ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman) writes:
>
>> Jiri Pirko <jiri@resnulli.us> writes:
>>
>>>>So this id needs to be globally unique?
>>>
>>> No. It is enough to be unique within a single system. It serves for no
>>> more than to find out 2 ids are same or not, no other info value.
>>>
>>> So when the drivers uses sane ids (like mac for example, or in case of
>>> rocker an id which is passed by qemu command line), the chances of
>>> collision are very very close to none (never say never).
>
>Thinking about what you said a little more.
>
>Two different sources of persistent numbers picking numbers by
>completely different algorithms can give you no assurance that you don't
>produce conflicts.
>
>The switch id as desisgned can not work.
>
>There are expected to be between 2**36 to 2**40 devices in this world.
>Your first switch id is a 64it number.  At the very best by the birthday
>pardox predicts there will be a conflict ever 2**32 devices or between
>2**4 and 2**8 devices in the world with conflicts.  If the ids are not
>randomly distributed (which they won't be) things could easily be much
>much worse.
>
>That is just good enough the code could get out there and run for years
>before you have the nightmare of having to fix all of userspace.   That
>is a nightmare no one needs.
>
>So please remove this broken code, and this broken concept from the
>kernel and go back to the drawing board.

In that case the phys port id is broken in the same way. Let's rather
think about how to avoid conflicts for both. Given the fact the
conflicts should be avoided only on a single baremetal, that should be
doable (for (bad) example using driver name mixed with driver created id).