From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756660AbcHXOue (ORCPT ); Wed, 24 Aug 2016 10:50:34 -0400 Received: from down.free-electrons.com ([37.187.137.238]:41192 "EHLO mail.free-electrons.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1756616AbcHXOuc (ORCPT ); Wed, 24 Aug 2016 10:50:32 -0400 Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2016 16:50:11 +0200 From: Thomas Petazzoni To: Ralph Sennhauser Cc: "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" , Gregory CLEMENT Subject: Re: [Regression?] Commit cb4f71c429 deliberately changes order of network interfaces Message-ID: <20160824165011.6c811913@free-electrons.com> In-Reply-To: <20160821151158.78da01e6@gmail.com> References: <20160821151158.78da01e6@gmail.com> Organization: Free Electrons X-Mailer: Claws Mail 3.13.2 (GTK+ 2.24.30; x86_64-pc-linux-gnu) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hello, On Sun, 21 Aug 2016 15:11:58 +0200, Ralph Sennhauser wrote: > Commit cb4f71c4298853db0c6751b1209e4535956f136c changes the order of > the network interfaces for armada-38x. As a special exception to the > "order by register address" rule says the comment in the dtsi. The > commit messages even calls it a violation. > > I can't remember having owned a device were the internal and external > numbering actually matched, so the important bit for me is whatever the > order is it should remain constant. > > Distributions like OpenWrt have to fix their code when moving from 4.4 > currently to past 4.6 [1]. Worse the so called "wrong ordering" is > actually documented [2]. There are likely more victims out there. In > case it goes unnoticed by the distribution the users lan becomes wan > and vice versa. We had many many users getting confused by the fact that the order of the network interfaces was inverted compared to: * The board documentations * The U-Boot numbering * And to a lesser extent, the vendor kernel So having things match the documentation numbering was in our opinion the least confusing thing moving forward. We should have done it earlier, but we thought that the rule "order by register address" was a very strong rule. At this point, reverting the patch is I believe cause more harm than good. It's going to re-confuse again people. Regarding the fact that the "wrong numbering if actually documented" is a fairly specious argument. The OpenWRT Wiki has never been an official documentation of any sort. I see it as a much more important aspect that the numbering of the Ethernet interfaces matches the user manual Marvell provides with its development and evaluation boards. The OpenWRT Wiki can certainly be fixed accordingly. Best regards, Thomas -- Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons Embedded Linux and Kernel engineering http://free-electrons.com