Re: [RFC] usbnet: use eth%d name for known ethernet devices

[Alan Stern]

On Thu, 24 Mar 2011, Arnd Bergmann wrote:

> The documentation for the USB ethernet devices suggests that
> only some devices are supposed to use usb0 as the network interface
> name instead of eth0. The logic used there, and documented in
> Kconfig for CDC is that eth0 will be used when the mac address
> is a globally assigned one, but usb0 is used for the locally
> managed range that is typically used on point-to-point links.
> 
> Unfortunately, this has caused a lot of pain on the smsc95xx
> device that is used on the popular pandaboard without an
> EEPROM to store the MAC address, which causes the driver to
> call random_ether_address().
> 
> Obviously, there should be a proper MAC addressed assigned to
> the device, and discussions are ongoing about how to solve
> this, but this patch at least makes sure that the default
> interface naming gets a little saner and matches what the
> user can expect based on the documentation, including for
> new devices.
> 
> The approach taken here is to flag whether a device might be a 
> point-to-point link with the new FLAG_PTP setting in the usbnet
> driver_info. A driver can set both FLAG_PTP and FLAG_ETHER if

You updated the flag name in the patch but not in the description.

> it is not sure (e.g. cdc_ether), or just one of the two.
> The usbnet framework only looks at the MAC address for device
> naming if both flags are set, otherwise it trusts the flag.

Alan Stern

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