On Wed, 4 Feb 2026 08:15:21 +0100 Jiri Pirko wrote:

quoted

quoted

String gives drivers flexibility to use anything. Perhaps I'm missing
your point. Are you againts free-form or just string and buf+buf_len
would be fine?  

I was thinking binary buf+len is fine, and we shouldn't really expose
this to user space in any shape or form (hence no concern about free
form).  

How you imagine to name faux device then? I'm sensing that you want to
get rid of busname/devname handle for things like this and rely on some
randomly generated index. But the whole ecosystem is bases on
busname/devname handle. Any idea how to overcome that?

Quoting myself form the other sub-thread:

  FWIW using devlink day to day, the bus/device is not at all useful as
  an identifier. Most of code touching devlink at Meta either matches
  on devlink dev info or assumes there's one instance on the system.

IOW I think you over-estimate the value of the bus/dev in real life
systems. And that's for instances that have a real bus/dev. Having
a faux bus/dev is completely pointless, right? The only question is
whether some code will straight up crash when seeing a device without
bus/dev.