This patch allows the administrator to configure the interface
name of a function using u_ether (e.g., eem, ncm, rndis).
Currently, all such interfaces, regardless of function type, are
always called usb0, usb1, etc. This makes it very cumbersome to
use more than one such type at a time, because userspace cannnot
easily tell the interfaces apart and apply the right
configuration to each one. Interface renaming in userspace based
on driver doesn't help, because the interfaces all have the same
driver. Without this patch, doing this require hacks/workarounds
such as setting fixed MAC addresses on the functions, and then
renaming by MAC address, or scraping configfs after each
interface is created to find out what it is.
Setting the interface name is done by writing to the same
"ifname" configfs attribute that reports the interface name after
the function is bound. The write must contain an interface
pattern such as "usb%d" (which will cause the net core to pick
the next available interface name starting with "usb").
This patch does not allow writing an exact interface name (as
opposed to a pattern) because if the interface already exists at
bind time, the bind will fail and the whole gadget will fail to
activate. This could be allowed in a future patch.
For compatibility with current userspace, when reading an ifname
that has not currently been set, the result is still "(unnamed
net_device)". Once a write to ifname happens, then reading ifname
will return whatever was last written.
Tested by configuring an rndis function and an ncm function on
the same gadget, and writing "rndis%d" to ifname on the rndis
function and "ncm%d" to ifname on the ncm function. When the
gadget was bound, the rndis interface was rndis0 and the ncm
interface was ncm0.
Signed-off-by: Lorenzo Colitti <lorenzo@google.com>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20210113234222.3272933-1-lorenzo@google.com
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
While there are a mix of things here, most of the stuff
were written from Kernel developer's PoV. So, add them to
the driver-api book.
A follow up for this patch would be to move documents from
there that are specific to sysadmins, adding them to the
admin-guide.
Signed-off-by: Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+samsung@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Johan Hovold <johan@kernel.org>
Acked-by: Felipe Balbi <felipe.balbi@linux.intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Lorenzo Colitti