Re: [PATCH] net: ethernet: mtk_eth_soc: add label support for GMACs

[Arınç ÜNAL]

On 04/04/2022 15:22, Andrew Lunn wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 04, 2022 at 02:40:00PM +0300, Arınç ÜNAL wrote:
> > From: René van Dorst <opensource@xxxxxxxxxx>
> >
> > Add label support for GMACs. The network interface of the GMAC will have
> > the string of the label property defined on the devicetree as its name.
>
> Sorry, but no. This has been discussed a few times, you need something
> in user space, udev or systemd etc to set interface names.
>
> Please look back in the archive at previous discussions.

Thanks for the heads up Andrew, I found your quote from 
https://lore.kernel.org/all/Ydhwfa%2FECqTE3rLx@xxxxxxx/:

> I agree with Russell here. I doubt this is going to be accepted.
>
> DSA is special because DSA is very old, much older than DT, and maybe
> older than udev. The old DSA platform drivers had a mechanism to
> supply the interface name to the DSA core. When we added a DT binding
> to DSA we kept that mechanism, since that mechanism had been used for
> a long time.
>
> Even if you could show there was a generic old mechanism, from before
> the days of DT, that allowed interface names to be set from platform
> drivers, i doubt it would be accepted because there is no continuity,
> which DSA has.

On MT7621 SoC, we can mux a switch phy of MT7530 (must be phy0 or 4) to 
the SoC's gmac1. So a UTP port connected to that phy becomes directly 
connected to the SoC's gmac1. Because of that, I wanted to be able to 
give the gmac's netdev interface a name from DT like DSA. However, the 
quote above makes sense why not to do so.

Thanks.
Arınç