adding if_dev member to struct ifnet

[Brooks Davis]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2003 at 01:14:39PM -0400, John Baldwin wrote:
> 
> Fair enough.  I think that Brooks planned to use a NULL device_t for
> interfaces w/o a backing new-bus device.  However, that means you
> still need if_name for all the non-newbus devices, so this seems
> somewhat pointless if if_name is the only reason.  Another counterpoint
> is that the new-bus namespace and the netif namespace aren't the same
> anyway and that seemed to be the point of this linkage.  The
> dev_t <> softc <> device_t linkages aren't about unifying namespaces.

The idea here is that virtually all uses of if_name/if_unit that aren't
just there for the users benefit are actually references to the
underlying driver not name of the interface.  Currently they are the
same (i.e. ifname is nearly always device_get_name(dev) or a bug prone
manual version there of), but I would like to separate them so we can
rename interfaces.

Since device_t is as close to a repository of driver/instance
information as we've got, I though using it would be a reasonable way
to go.  As a side benefit, most drivers have a copy of it in their softc
already so you'd have a standard place to put it.

I suppose a usable alternative would be to revive if_name and if_unit
as something like if_drvname and if_drvunit.

-- Brooks

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