[net] Revert "net: core: maybe return -EEXIST in __dev_alloc_name"

[Michael Ellerman]

Rasmus Villemoes <linux at rasmusvillemoes.dk> writes:
> On Tue, Dec 19 2017, Michael Ellerman <michael at concordia.ellerman.id.au> wrote:
>>> From: Johannes Berg <johannes.berg at intel.com>
>>> 
>>> This reverts commit d6f295e9def0; some userspace (in the case
>>
>> This revert seems to have broken networking on one of my powerpc
>> machines, according to git bisect.
>>
>> The symptom is DHCP fails and I don't get a link, I didn't dig any
>> further than that. I can if it's helpful.
>>
>> I think the problem is that 87c320e51519 ("net: core: dev_get_valid_name
>> is now the same as dev_alloc_name_ns") only makes sense while
>> d6f295e9def0 remains in the tree.
>
> I'm sorry about all of this, I really didn't think there would be such
> consequences of changing an errno return. Indeed, d6f29 was preparation
> for unifying the two functions that do the exact same thing (and how we
> ever got into that situation is somewhat unclear), except for
> their behaviour in the case the requested name already exists. So one of
> the two interfaces had to change its return value, and as I wrote, I
> thought EEXIST was the saner choice when an explicit name (no %d) had
> been requested.

No worries.

>> ie. before the entire series, dev_get_valid_name() would return EEXIST,
>> and that was retained when 87c320e51519 was merged, but now that
>> d6f295e9def0 has been reverted dev_get_valid_name() is returning ENFILE.
>>
>> I can get the network up again if I also revert 87c320e51519 ("net:
>> core: dev_get_valid_name is now the same as dev_alloc_name_ns"), or with
>> the gross patch below.
>
> I don't think changing -ENFILE to -EEXIST would be right either, since
> dev_get_valid_name() used to be able to return both (-EEXIST in the case
> where there's no %d, -ENFILE in the case where we end up calling
> dev_alloc_name_ns()). If anything, we could do the check for the old
> -EEXIST condition first, and then call dev_alloc_name_ns(). But I'm also
> fine with reverting.

Yeah I think a revert would be best, given it's nearly rc5.

My userspace is not exotic AFAIK, just debian something, so presumably
this will affect other people too.

cheers