On 04/20/2016 05:31 PM, Stephen Warren wrote:
From: Stephen Warren swarren@nvidia.com
Currently, if multiple rtl8169 devices exist on the PCI bus, they all get the same name, which prevents the user from selecting which to use via the ethact environment variable. Port the auto-naming code from the e1000 driver to solve this.
Signed-off-by: Stephen Warren swarren@nvidia.com
Having to put this code into each Ethernet driver seems a bit odd. Surely the core should handle this; should eth_get_dev_by_name() parse "#n" out of the ethact value and compare it to the device sequence number?
It looks like I should be able to set ethprime to e.g. eth0, eth1, etc. and this should work. However, I couldn't get ethprime to behave sensibly, and I'm not sure what its semantics are supposed to be. Specifically, ethprime seems to only be used if ethact isn't set, yet accessing the network (e.g. running "dhcp zImage") seems to set ethact, thus preventing any further modification to ethprime from having any effect. Equally, simply running e.g. "dhcp zImage" twice in a row doesn't seem to work; perhaps the subsequent attempts perform another lookup by name from ethact rather than just using the same device pointer from before? Is ethprime intended to be functional at present, or is it some legacy feature that's bit-rotted and should be removed?
Simon, Joe, any thoughts on those questions re: this patch?