[PATCH 1/2] ARM: mvebu: change order of ethernet DT nodes on Armada 38x

[Thomas Petazzoni]

Hello,

On Wed, 24 Feb 2016 22:33:50 +0000, Russell King - ARM Linux wrote:

> I didn't say no to it, I merely asked a few pertinent questions and
> made some pertinent points.
> 
> Let me restate:
> 
> * Today, people who switch between mainline and vendor kernels
>   experience some pain due to the NIC order changing.
> 
> * Mainline has had support for Armada 38x for 2 years now, which is
>   long enough for it to have gained users.  AFAICS, there haven't been
>   any complaints about the different NIC ordering.  Changing the NIC
>   ordering is going to cause breakage to these users when they migrate
>   across the change.
> 
> By making the change, we're effectively telling these mainline-only
> users "we don't care about your setups, we're going to break them"
> because that's exactly what we're going to do.
> 
> Of course, if no one complains about the change, you've got away
> with it.

I agree with you that the change isn't perfect, it's really a matter of
trade-off. The perfect change would be to be able to help the network
subsystem in its naming of network interfaces, but this has always been
rejected. It would have indeed been better to add this DT node ordering
work-around earlier, but we didn't do it, and we're in the present.

So again, yes the proposed change is not "great", but I believe it's
relatively reasonable. If we indeed get feedback that it's breaking
things for too many people, I guess we'll just revert. I don't mind if
things remain as they are today, i.e with a weird ordering of the
network interfaces. It's just annoying for new people using the
platform, but it's not horrible either.

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com