Hi,
As far as I can tell, "name" predates the qdev conversion, and was used just for error messages and such.
Yes, was already there when I touched the code the first time.
It defaulted to "host". When Gerd did the qdev conversion, he made "id" default to "name", then "host". See commit 6b5bbd04. Defaulting "id" that way was probably not such a good idea. We generally don't make up qdev IDs, because that risks collision with user-specified IDs. Since we've broken compatibility already, I figure we could just as well stop defaulting "id" to "host". When we need to identify the device to the user, use "id" if it exists, else its PCI address.
Agree, we should not make up defaults for 'id'. I did that in a few places where some naming existed already to ease transition. nics with name= used to get that as default id too. But in the end it turned out it caused more trouble than it helped ...
cheers, Gerd
