Re: Error message from device_rename in drivers/base/core.c

[Kay Sievers <kay.sievers@vrfy.org>]

On Wed, 2007-08-08 at 08:59 -0500, Larry Finger wrote:
> Kay Sievers wrote:
> > On 8/8/07, Larry Finger <larry.finger@lwfinger.net> wrote:
> >> I agree with you, but you and David can fight it out. While finding out where to ask/complain about
> >> udev, I had a private communication with GregKH. He thinks that a patch to fix this has already been
> >> pushed through Linus. As Linville's wireless-dev tree is a little behind, I'm waiting to see if it
> >> gets fixed here by 2.6.23-rc3. If not, I'll talk to the udev/hotplug folks.
> > 
> > Hmm, I can not immediately see how udev could request the renaming to
> > the same name:
> > 
> >   /* look if we want to change the name of the netif */
> >   if (strcmp(udev->name, udev->dev->kernel) != 0) {
> >     ...
> >     retval = rename_netif(udev);
> >     ...
> >   }
> > 
> > What udev version is it and which distro and version?
> 
> My distro is openSUSE 10.2, which is fully patched/updated. According to YaST, I'm using version 
> 103-12 x86_64. My kernel is 2.6.23-rc2 from John Linville's git tree - I run bcm43xx-mac80211.

Oh, that's likely a bug in the SUSE versions of the persistent net
interface rules. It is calling ifrename when it needs to swap interface
names (temp rename to free the target name), that logic which may have
that bug.
For the next SUSE release, it is replaced by the (now available)
upstream stuff from the udev tree, which most distros use now, and which
should not have that problem.

Thanks,
Kay