Wolfgang Denk wrote:
Dear Kumar Gala,
In message 119C6E28-E979-4B97-87AD-9603CD5FFDAA@kernel.crashing.org you wrote:
This makes the code a bit more flexible to the number of ethernet interfaces. Right now we assume a max of 10 interfaces.
Hm... where exactly is this artificial limit coming from? Do we really need it?
We need some upper limit to stop checking at.
The upper limit should be the real (configured) number of network interfaces, not some artificial limit which is either too high or too low.
It is (was) - CFG_MAX_NUM_ETH: + for (i = 0; i < CFG_MAX_NUM_ETH; i++) {
Actually, I don't see any arbitrary upper limit in the code, including Kumar's value of 10 (well, until you overflow the strings, anyway, but that is 100 interfaces).
If we assume, that all existing interfaces must have addresses assigned, we could use a "break" here instead of the "continue". That would be (1) much faster on most boards and (2) would allow us to get rid of the artifical limit of 10.
CFG_MAX_NUM_ETH would presumably be the physical max and the /aliases/ethernet (and associated env variables) should *not* be sparse, therefore I agree with the the "break" recommendation.
What do you think?
I dont like making this assumption and do think its too much work to check 10 possible aliases and skip to the next one if it doesn't exist.
I do not want to see any such hard-coded limits if they can be avoided. Which problem do you see to stop here at the first interface that has no MAC address assigned to it?
I originally wrote to support sparse ethernet MAC addresses, but on reflection I don't think that is an issue because we will have /aliases/ethernet[0-9]+ which won't be sparse, even if the actual SOC (e.g. PowerQuicc) channels that are used for ethernet are used in a sparse manner.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk
Best regards, gvb