Re: [8/9][PATCH 2.6] Small fixes and clean-up

On Sat, 19 Jun 2004 17:28:01 -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:

In Linux lists of model names are discouraged.  It's not terribly bad in 
via-rhine, but overall these things wind up getting patches quite often, 
and become a maintenance annoyance.

It's up to you as maintainer, but I would recommend removing the string 
completely.  For dmesg/printk purposes, the user only needs to know they 
have a 'via-rhine' controller.

The reason I put that in is that lspci does not identify those chips
correctly (because models differ only by PCI revision, not PCI id)
and thus people get confused. But maybe I should rather file patches
against pci.ids. Okay, I think I'll remove the model names.

quoted

-	dev = alloc_etherdev(sizeof(*rp));
-	if (dev == NULL) {
+	dev = alloc_etherdev(sizeof(struct rhine_private));
+	if (!dev) {
		rc = -ENOMEM;
-		printk(KERN_ERR "init_ethernet failed for card #%d\n",
-		       card_idx);
+		printk(KERN_ERR "alloc_etherdev failed\n");

this error message change seems like a step backwards... print out 
pci_name() or _something_ to let the user know which card failed.

It is indeed. I plan to clean up all error messages together (there
are other issues like where dev->name is defined, what information is
useful, should use a bit mask instead of debug level, etc.).

Roger