Comment 12 for bug 199140

On Fri, Jan 23, 2009 at 11:36:03PM -0000, Steve Langasek wrote:
> Hi Alexander,
>
> As requested on bug #320652, here's the lshal output for my tap0 vs.
> eth0 devices. The key difference I notice is the
> net.originating_device, which shows only
> '/org/freedesktop/Hal/devices/computer' for tap0 - I think this
> corresponds to the fact that /sys/class/net/tap0/ has no 'device' entry,
> and seems to be an accurate way to distinguish physical devices from
> virtual ones.

There is another difference: the driver will be NULL. However, we
patched NM to not disable such devices as we have buggy drivers that
dont get this right. I think it was a broadcom driver quite common in
dell notebooks ... and iirc that was closed so we could not fix it.

We could try to drop that patch now; but i think its safer to do what
you suggest and explicitly ignore devices that dont have a reasonable
parent device; for now checking for the computer parent seems
worth a try.

 affects ubuntu/network-manager
 status triaged

 - Alexander