Re: [PATCH] drivers/net/defxx.c: use %pM to show MAC address
From: David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Date: 2010-01-04 19:03:29
Also in:
lkml
From: "Maciej W. Rozycki" <redacted> Date: Mon, 4 Jan 2010 18:49:48 +0000 (GMT)
Nack. While I appreciate your effort, the FDDI standard defines opposite bit-ordering for MAC addresses written in the dash-separated and the colon-separated hexadecimal notation, which makes your change invalid, sorry (you'd have to bit-swap them too and that would make addresses counter-intuitive). Please note that `ifconfig' consistently uses the dash-separated notation for FDDI interfaces too (I haven't checked other tools like those in the "iproute" package; they may be buggy).
Well: 1) It's a bootup kernel message, we can use whatever format we want. 2) As for consistency's sake, the only other FDDI driver using alloc_fddidev() and friends, skfp, uses yet another format for printing FDDI addresses to the log: pr_debug(KERN_INFO "HW-Addr: %02x %02x %02x %02x %02x %02x\n", So striving for "consistency" is a bit of a stretch. Against a userspace tool's output format? Even more so... And I doubt anybody is going to suddenly faint and become confused if they see the MAC address in ethernet format. In fact I'd rather see all of our FDDI drivers use the standard ethernet MAC format in visible kernel log messages and save all of that object code space that gets taken up by these by-hand printk's in these obscure drivers.