Re: [libvirt] [PATCH v2] dots should be valid characters in interface names

On 05/19/2010 10:05 PM, Laine Stump wrote: In dev_valid_name() in net/core/dev.c, the following restrictions are enforced as of 2.6.27: - Empty strings are disallowed - Length must not meet or exceed 16 (IFNAMSIZ) - '.' and '..' are each invalid as freestanding names (but accepted as part of a longer string) - whitespace and '/' characters are prohibited at any point in the string ...and those are the only limitations in play. Frankly, I'm a bit surprised colons are allowed -- my intuition was that they would be permitted only for named IPs rather than devices -- but such is the logic given here, and a bit of experimentation shows that the kernel accepts them (though they trigger bugs in iproute2, which appears in at least one place to make the same assumption I did; fun!) A revised patch is attached. This lifts its logic from its kernel counterpart, and is updated only to permit forward slashes (which, while disallowed for interface names with the kernel, are required for *device* names -- for which the ESX driver happens to overload this field. Ugh).