DEVICE_RENAME(9)                  Device drivers infrastructure                  DEVICE_RENAME(9)



NAME
       device_rename - renames a device

SYNOPSIS
       int device_rename(struct device * dev, const char * new_name);

ARGUMENTS
       dev
           the pointer to the struct device to be renamed

       new_name
           the new name of the device

DESCRIPTION
       It is the responsibility of the caller to provide mutual exclusion between two different
       calls of device_rename on the same device to ensure that new_name is valid and won't
       conflict with other devices.

NOTE
       Don't call this function. Currently, the networking layer calls this function, but that
       will change. The following text from Kay Sievers offers some insight:

       Renaming devices is racy at many levels, symlinks and other stuff are not replaced
       atomically, and you get a “move” uevent, but it's not easy to connect the event to the old
       and new device. Device nodes are not renamed at all, there isn't even support for that in
       the kernel now.

       In the meantime, during renaming, your target name might be taken by another driver,
       creating conflicts. Or the old name is taken directly after you renamed it -- then you get
       events for the same DEVPATH, before you even see the “move” event. It's just a mess, and
       nothing new should ever rely on kernel device renaming. Besides that, it's not even
       implemented now for other things than (driver-core wise very simple) network devices.

       We are currently about to change network renaming in udev to completely disallow renaming
       of devices in the same namespace as the kernel uses, because we can't solve the problems
       properly, that arise with swapping names of multiple interfaces without races. Means,
       renaming of eth[0-9]* will only be allowed to some other name than eth[0-9]*, for the
       aforementioned reasons.

       Make up a “real” name in the driver before you register anything, or add some other
       attributes for userspace to find the device, or use udev to add symlinks -- but never
       rename kernel devices later, it's a complete mess. We don't even want to get into that and
       try to implement the missing pieces in the core. We really have other pieces to fix in the
       driver core mess. :)

COPYRIGHT
Kernel Hackers Manual 4.8.                 January 2017                          DEVICE_RENAME(9)