The ancient restriction banning renaming of busy network interfaces appears to be purposeless. Everything that depends on a network interface's name is done under the dev_base_lock in any case. This makes it much easier to use things like netconsole which bring up a network interface before userspace has started: presently these will cause interface renamings to fail, breaking any userspace that relies on renaming devices to avoid reliance on the potentially-unstable kernel-assigned name. Signed-off-by: Nick Alcock <nix@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> --- net/core/dev.c | 2 -- 1 files changed, 0 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) Note: this may very well be wrong, as I know essentially nothing about this part of the kernel. All I know is that without a patch something like this, netconsole is nearly useless to me, so many panics are uncapturable. Maybe there is some constraint preventing the kernel from reliably renaming up interfaces. In that case, netconsole, DHCP netboot discovery and so on probably need to grow the ability to rename them themselves. diff --git a/net/core/dev.c b/net/core/dev.c index b8f74cf..87e9f88 100644 --- a/net/core/dev.c +++ b/net/core/dev.c @@ -901,8 +901,6 @@ int dev_change_name(struct net_device *dev, const char *newname) BUG_ON(!dev_net(dev)); net = dev_net(dev); - if (dev->flags & IFF_UP) - return -EBUSY; if (!dev_valid_name(newname)) return -EINVAL; -- 1.6.5.1 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
