Re: [PATCH] net: set default DEVTYPE for all ethernet based devices

[Veaceslav Falico]

On Fri, Jan 31, 2014 at 01:54:03AM +0100, Tom Gundersen wrote:
> Hi Veaceslav,
>
> Thanks for your quick reply.
>
> On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 4:05 PM, Veaceslav Falico <vfalico@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 02:20:02PM +0100, Tom Gundersen wrote:
> > > In systemd's networkd and udevd, we would like to give the administrator a
> > > simple way to filter net devices by their DEVTYPE [0][1]. Other software
> > > such as ConnMan and NetworkManager uses a similar filtering already.
> > >
> > > Currently, plain ethernet devices have DEVTYPE=(null). This patch sets the
> > > devtype to "ethernet" instead. This avoids the need for special-casing the
> > > DEVTYPE=(null) case in userspace, and also avoids false positives, as
> > > there
> > > are several other types of netdevs that also have DEVTYPE=(null).
> >
> >
> > There are quite a few users at least in usb and wireless drivers:
> >
> > net#git grep alloc_etherdev drivers/net/wireless/ drivers/net/usb | wc -l
> > 18
> >
> > In usb, though, there might be some false positives of this grep, as
> > there are a few devices which might be considered ethernet.
>
> Ah, yes I missed the #define of alloc_etherdev(). Looking through
> these, it shouldn't be too hard to keep this patch and additionally
> fix up the false positives to opt-out of setting the DEVTYPE. Does
> that sound like something that would be acceptable?

Sure, I guess it would be nice to add something like alloc_netdev() (or any
other name for 'generic' network device) and alloc_wirelessdev() for
wireless - so that alloc_*dev() would be small inline wrappers for
alloc_netdev() and setting the type. I didn't check deep enough though, so
I might have overlooked something :).

I've taken a bit deeper look at USB network drivers and it seems that all
of them are ethernet, whilst usbnet (generic network framework for usb
networking devices, used for quite a few drivers) already tries to guess
the type - default is ethernet, and if there are W[WL]AN flags set - update
devtype accordingly. So you might want to take a look at usbnet_probe(), if
that'll suit your needs.

> Cheers,
>
> Tom
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