• Eric W. Biederman's avatar
    [PATCH] net: Ignore sysfs network device rename bugs. · 92749821
    Eric W. Biederman authored
    The generic networking code ensures that no two networking devices
    have the same name, so  there is no time except when sysfs has
    implementation bugs that device_rename when called from
    dev_change_name will fail.
    
    The current error handling for errors from device_rename in
    dev_change_name is wrong and results in an unusable and unrecoverable
    network device if device_rename is happens to return an error.
    
    This patch removes the buggy error handling.  Which confines the mess
    when device_rename hits a problem to sysfs, instead of propagating it
    the rest of the network stack.  Making linux a little more robust.
    
    Without this patch you can observe what happens when sysfs has a bug
    when CONFIG_SYSFS_DEPRECATED is not set and you attempt to rename
    a real network device to a name like (broken_parity_status, device,
    modalias, power, resource2, subsystem_vendor, class,  driver, irq,
    msi_bus, resource, subsystem, uevent, config, enable, local_cpus,
    numa_node, resource0, subsystem_device, vendor)
    
    Greg has a patch that fixes the sysfs bugs but he doesn't trust it
    for a 2.6.21 timeframe.  This patch which just ignores errors should
    be safe and it keeps the system from going completely wacky.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarEric W. Biederman <ebiederm@xmission.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
    92749821
dev.c 85.8 KB