Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Mon, 19 May 2003 07:33:59 +1000 | From | Anton Blanchard <> | Subject | Naming devices |
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Hi,
I just spent 2 hours trying to make a machine boot. It had one bad disk and one bad network card. Normally not a problem, but this thing had 40 cards in it so identifying the problem ones was not straight forward.
I was wondering why we dont have a consistent way of printing a device location? If all drivers used the same thing, eg:
struct pci_dev *foo; ... printf("%s: could not enable card\n", PCI_LOCATION(foo));
Which by default would print pci bus/devfn and an arch could override eg on ppc64 it would also print a location code:
U1.6-P1-I2/E1 (90:0c.0)
This sounds like the domain of the event logging guys but I havent seen anything from them in a while. The nice thing about this is that when we get pci domains nothing needs to be changed in the driver, we just update the PCI_LOCATION macro.
Also the tendency of network drivers to print "eth0: foo" during initialisation is even more of a problem. If you get a bad card then you could end up reusing the eth0 name for a subsequent device, making pinpointing the problem card difficult. On top of that some drivers use dev->name between calling alloc_netdev() and register_netdev() so that you end up with error messages like "eth%d: failed".
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