Re: [PATCH net-next] net: netdevsim: Support setting dev->perm_addr

[Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>]

On Mon, 03 Feb 2025 18:21:24 +0100 Toke Høiland-Jørgensen wrote:
> Network management daemons that match on the device permanent address
> currently have no virtual interface types to test against.
> NetworkManager, in particular, has carried an out of tree patch to set
> the permanent address on netdevsim devices to use in its CI for this
> purpose.
> 
> To support this use case, add a debugfs file for netdevsim to set the
> permanent address to an arbitrary value.

netdevsim is not for user space testing. We have gone down the path
of supporting random features in it already, and then wasted time trying
to maintain them thru various devlink related perturbations, just to
find out that the features weren't actually used any more.

NetworkManager can do the HW testing using virtme-ng.

If you want to go down the netdevsim path you must provide a meaningful 
in-tree test, but let's be clear that we will 100% delete both the test
and the netdevsim functionality if it causes any issues.
-- 
pw-bot: cr