Message-ID: <1ba2fa240807280744r5ea8c58aqf53cc99abb4cf084@mail.gmail.com> (sfid-20080728_164420_099548_CA996BF9)
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2008 17:44:13 +0300
From: "Tomas Winkler" <tomasw@gmail.com>
To: "Michael Buesch" <mb@bu3sch.de>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/6] mac80211: allow no mac address until firmware load
Cc: "Dan Williams" <dcbw@redhat.com>,
	"Johannes Berg" <johannes@sipsolutions.net>,
	"Luis Carlos Cobo" <luisca@cozybit.com>,
	linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org
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On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 5:25 PM, Michael Buesch <mb@bu3sch.de> wrote:
> On Monday 28 July 2008 15:57:45 Dan Williams wrote:
>> > (What are the udev problems, btw?)
>>
>> People seem to want persistent device names.  Since the kernel doesn't
>> provide stable device/bus enumeration, there are udev hacks (see
>> attached from Fedora 9) that read the MAC address of the card on
>> hot-plug and then assign it to a cached device name so that every time I
>> plug in my Netgear MA401 it gets "eth2".
>
> Yeah well. But using a pseudo-random MAC as a base to build a persistent
> naming scheme on sounds pretty fragile to me. ;)
>
> I think cards that don't supply MAC early simply cannot support
> a really working persistent naming scheme well. udev should probably
> just enumerate eth0 - ethX as it sees the devices. That's as good
> as mixing a numbering scheme into a pseudo MAC, IMO. And it's
> less confusing and it pushes a lot of policy decisions into userspace.

Can devices supply something depending on its bus numbering that will
not change unless it's plugged out.
Just a thought.
Tomas