This whole idea isn't going to work until somebody makes the bus/kld
code smarter. The idea here is to change the module's internal name
from "foo" to "if_foo" so that ifconfig can tell a network driver from
a non-network one. However doing this doesn't work correctly no matter
how you slice it. For everything to work, you have to change the name
in both the driver_t struct and the DRIVER_MODULE() declaration. The
problems are:
- If you change the name in both places, then the kernel thinks that
the device's name is now "if_foo", so you get things like:
if_foo0: <FOO ethernet> irq foo at device foo on pcifoo
if_foo0: Ethernet address: foo:foo:foo:foo:foo:foo
This is bogus. Now the device name doesn't agree with the logical
interface name. There's no reason for this, and it violates the
principle of least astonishment.
- If you leave the name in the driver_t struct as "foo" and only
change the names in the DRIVER_MODULE() declaration to "if_foo" then
attaching drivers to child devices doesn't work because the names don't
agree. This breaks miibus: drivers that need to have miibuses and PHY
drivers attached never get them.
In other words: damned if you do, damned if you don't.
This needs to be thought through some more. Since the drivers that
use miibus are broken, I have to change these all back in order to
make them work again. Yes this will stop ifconfig from being able
to demand load driver modules. On the whole, I'd rather have that
than having the drivers not work at all.