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driver-core: document restrictions on device_rename()

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Add text, courtesy of Kay Sievers, that provides some background on
device_rename() and why it shouldn't be used.

Signed-off-by: Timur Tabi <timur@freescale.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
This commit is contained in:
Timur Tabi 2010-12-13 14:08:52 -06:00 committed by Greg Kroah-Hartman
parent ebf53826e1
commit a5462516aa
1 changed files with 28 additions and 1 deletions
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29
drivers/base/core.c
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@ -1551,7 +1551,34 @@ EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL(device_destroy);
* on the same device to ensure that new_name is valid and
* won't conflict with other devices.
*
* "Never use this function, bad things will happen" - gregkh
* Note: Don't call this function. Currently, the networking layer calls this
* function, but that will change. The following text from Kay Sievers offers
* some insight:
*
* Renaming devices is racy at many levels, symlinks and other stuff are not
* replaced atomically, and you get a "move" uevent, but it's not easy to
* connect the event to the old and new device. Device nodes are not renamed at
* all, there isn't even support for that in the kernel now.
*
* In the meantime, during renaming, your target name might be taken by another
* driver, creating conflicts. Or the old name is taken directly after you
* renamed it -- then you get events for the same DEVPATH, before you even see
* the "move" event. It's just a mess, and nothing new should ever rely on
* kernel device renaming. Besides that, it's not even implemented now for
* other things than (driver-core wise very simple) network devices.
*
* We are currently about to change network renaming in udev to completely
* disallow renaming of devices in the same namespace as the kernel uses,
* because we can't solve the problems properly, that arise with swapping names
* of multiple interfaces without races. Means, renaming of eth[0-9]* will only
* be allowed to some other name than eth[0-9]*, for the aforementioned
* reasons.
*
* Make up a "real" name in the driver before you register anything, or add
* some other attributes for userspace to find the device, or use udev to add
* symlinks -- but never rename kernel devices later, it's a complete mess. We
* don't even want to get into that and try to implement the missing pieces in
* the core. We really have other pieces to fix in the driver core mess. :)
*/
int device_rename(struct device *dev, const char *new_name)
{