[...]

Having looked at the qeth driver now, I think the comment in netdevice.h
should be changed to state that this is for distinguishing devices that
share a link-layer address, and the drivers using it for other purposes
should stop doing so (if that doesn't break userland).

Agreed, the qeth driver eluded me, its not in ./drivers/net as you
noted in the other thread.

[...]

quoted

quoted

3. Add a new field 'physport' to 'struct net_device' and export it to sysfs.

Probably not we already have two fields that seem ill-defined no reason
to add another to the confusion. If you absolutely can't make dev_id or
if_port coherent then maybe but I really think one of the above two will
work.

I think we should tighten up documentation and implementation of the
existing fields, but there is still a need for this new one.

One thing that needs to be clearly specified is the scope of the
physport identifier - the controller, board, physical machine, ... or
universe.  In a VM, controller and board scope are pretty useless as it
typically can't tell which devices belong to the same controller or
board anyway.  A universally unique identifier is probably not too hard
to implement as there is likely to be at least one MAC address
permanently assigned to each physical port.

Ben.

OK, sounds reasonable to me a new field should work.


-- 
John Fastabend         Intel Corporation