Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next V7 02/14] devlink: introduce shared devlink instance for PFs on same chip

From: Jakub Kicinski <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2026 18:06:36 -0800

On Wed, 4 Feb 2026 08:15:21 +0100 Jiri Pirko wrote:
> >> String gives drivers flexibility to use anything. Perhaps I'm missing
> >> your point. Are you againts free-form or just string and buf+buf_len
> >> would be fine?  
> >
> >I was thinking binary buf+len is fine, and we shouldn't really expose
> >this to user space in any shape or form (hence no concern about free
> >form).  
> 
> How you imagine to name faux device then? I'm sensing that you want to
> get rid of busname/devname handle for things like this and rely on some
> randomly generated index. But the whole ecosystem is bases on
> busname/devname handle. Any idea how to overcome that?

Quoting myself form the other sub-thread:

  FWIW using devlink day to day, the bus/device is not at all useful as
  an identifier. Most of code touching devlink at Meta either matches
  on devlink dev info or assumes there's one instance on the system.

IOW I think you over-estimate the value of the bus/dev in real life
systems. And that's for instances that have a real bus/dev. Having
a faux bus/dev is completely pointless, right? The only question is
whether some code will straight up crash when seeing a device without
bus/dev.