On Thu, 24 Mar 2011, Arnd Bergmann wrote: > The documentation for the USB ethernet devices suggests that > only some devices are supposed to use usb0 as the network interface > name instead of eth0. The logic used there, and documented in > Kconfig for CDC is that eth0 will be used when the mac address > is a globally assigned one, but usb0 is used for the locally > managed range that is typically used on point-to-point links. > > Unfortunately, this has caused a lot of pain on the smsc95xx > device that is used on the popular pandaboard without an > EEPROM to store the MAC address, which causes the driver to > call random_ether_address(). > > Obviously, there should be a proper MAC addressed assigned to > the device, and discussions are ongoing about how to solve > this, but this patch at least makes sure that the default > interface naming gets a little saner and matches what the > user can expect based on the documentation, including for > new devices. > > The approach taken here is to flag whether a device might be a > point-to-point link with the new FLAG_PTP setting in the usbnet > driver_info. A driver can set both FLAG_PTP and FLAG_ETHER if You updated the flag name in the patch but not in the description. > it is not sure (e.g. cdc_ether), or just one of the two. > The usbnet framework only looks at the MAC address for device > naming if both flags are set, otherwise it trusts the flag. Alan Stern -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-usb" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
