When the kernel does not provide a modalias, we generate our own for usb devices.
For some reason, we generated the expected usb:vXXXXpYYYY string, suffixed by "*".
It was added that way already in 796b06c21b, but I
think that was a mistake, and Kay was thinking about the match pattern instead
of the matched string.
For example, for a qemu device:
old: "usb:v0627p0001*"
new: "usb:v0627p0001:QEMU USB Tablet"
On the match side, all hwdb files in the wild seem to be using match patterns
with "*" at the end. So we can add more stuff to our generated modalias with
impunity.
This will allow more obvious and more certain matches on USB devices. In
principle the vendor+product id should be unique, but it's only 8 digits, and
there's a high chance of people getting this wrong. And matching the wrong
device would be quite problematic. By including the name in the match string we
make a mismatch much less likely.
Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
df7667323d