netconsole: allow selection of egress interface via MAC address

Browse source

Currently, netconsole has two methods of configuration - module
parameter and configfs. The former interface allows for netconsole
activation earlier during boot (by specifying the module parameter on
the kernel command line), so it is preferred for debugging issues which
arise before userspace is up/the configfs interface can be used. The
module parameter syntax requires specifying the egress interface name.
This requirement makes it hard to use for a couple reasons:
- The egress interface name can be hard or impossible to predict. For
  example, installing a new network card in a system can change the
  interface names assigned by the kernel.
- When constructing the module parameter, one may have trouble
  determining the original (kernel-assigned) name of the interface
  (which is the name that should be given to netconsole) if some stable
  interface naming scheme is in effect. A human can usually look at
  kernel logs to determine the original name, but this is very painful
  if automation is constructing the parameter.

For these reasons, allow selection of the egress interface via MAC
address when configuring netconsole using the module parameter. Update
the netconsole documentation with an example of the new syntax.
Selection of egress interface by MAC address via configfs is far less
interesting (since when this interface can be used, one should be able
to easily convert between MAC address and interface name), so it is left
unimplemented.

Signed-off-by: Uday Shankar <ushankar@purestorage.com>
Reviewed-by: Breno Leitao <leitao@debian.org>
Tested-by: Breno Leitao <leitao@debian.org>
Reviewed-by: Simon Horman <horms@kernel.org>
Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20250312-netconsole-v6-2-3437933e79b8@purestorage.com
Signed-off-by: Paolo Abeni <pabeni@redhat.com>

...

This commit is contained in:

Uday Shankar 2025-03-12 13:51:47 -06:00 • committed by Paolo Abeni

parent 6d6c1ba782

commit f8a10bed32

3 changed files with 50 additions and 13 deletions

Show all changes Ignore whitespace when comparing lines Ignore changes in amount of whitespace Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL

Download patch file Download diff file Expand all files Collapse all files

6

Documentation/networking/netconsole.rst

View file

6

include/linux/netpoll.h

View file

51

net/core/netpoll.c

View file