Subject: Re: [RFC] change netdevice to use struct device instead of struct class_device

From: Greg KH <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 3 Jul 2006 16:16:10 -0700

On Mon, Jul 03, 2006 at 07:07:49PM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Greg KH wrote:
> >I have a patch here that converts the network device structure to use
> >the struct device instead of struct class_device structure.  It's a bit
> >too big to post here, so it's at:
> >	http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/gregkh/gregkh-2.6/patches/network-class_device-to-device.patch
> 
> So....  this is a userspace ABI change, then?

No, not really.  According to Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-class all
code that uses /sys/class/foo/ needs to be able to handle the fact that
those entries might be symlinks and not just directories.  Everything
that I know of already works properly because the input layer has had
symlinks in /sys/class/input for quite some time now.

Do you know of any tools that use /sys/class/net/ that can not handle
symlinks there?  I've been running this on my boxes for about a week now
with no noticeable issues.  Renaming interfaces works just fine too.

thanks,

greg k-h