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Domsch: Consistent Network Device Naming coming to Fedora 15Domsch: Consistent Network Device Naming coming to Fedora 15Posted Jan 27, 2011 3:16 UTC (Thu) by clump (subscriber, #27801)Parent article: Domsch: Consistent Network Device Naming coming to Fedora 15
This will be a change from Linux's model of naming network devices as 'ethX', which has existed for many, many years. Such a change, according to Domsch's comments in the blog, will not provide soft links to the 'eth'-style of naming devices, which again, has existed for many, many years.
Rather than make such an invasive change that will break things relying on 'eth' names, why not soft link *from* eth devices to these new names? "Rejected upsteam"?
Zero backward compatibility is preferred? Users should now create a udev rule?
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Domsch: Consistent Network Device Naming coming to Fedora 15 Posted Jan 27, 2011 5:14 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]
Unlike just about everything else in UNIX, network interfaces don't work like files; no /dev/eth0 exists. And related to that, various assumptions get broken if more than one name exists for a given interface.
Domsch: Consistent Network Device Naming coming to Fedora 15 Posted Jan 27, 2011 5:50 UTC (Thu) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link]
I don't see the point in calling the onboard interfaces em0 .. em(N) when referring instead to onboard interfaces as eth0..ethN -- mapped the way as the "em" devices are going to be -- would presumably break compatibility with existing configurations to a much lesser degree.
In addition, I believe something like "eth_s3p1" would probably work better than "pci3#1" when referring to the first port on slot number three. If you have a fixed number of similar slots, the slot technology is probably irrelevant. And shouldn't a device name give some sort of indication of what type of device it is? "pci3#1" doesn't tell you without further context that someone is talking about a network interface.
If there were static device naming for serial ports wouldn't pci3#1 possibly be confused with the first serial port on slot 3 as well, for example?
Domsch: Consistent Network Device Naming coming to Fedora 15 Posted Jan 27, 2011 7:05 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
it's not always clear from the back of the system which pci slot is what number in terms of software (especially on servers where you may have several different variations of slot types)
the detection order of slot types varies between releases just as much as the detection order of network cards, in fact I've had more problems from the card slot order changing then I have from the card type order changing.
Domsch: Consistent Network Device Naming coming to Fedora 15 Posted Jan 27, 2011 16:37 UTC (Thu) by mebrown (subscriber, #7960) [Link]
sorry, incorrect.
There are several standard ways to get information about PCI slot numbering. The $PIR table being as old as the PCI standard, itself. The $PIR table will give you a mapping of how each PCI bus/dev is physically labelled. There are also newer standards using ACPI and SMBIOS tables for the same. (The newer standards also give a mechanism to label embedded devices with their physical label, which the older $PIR lacked.)
You are probably thinking of the older problem where NIC enumeration changed from depth-first search to breadth-first, changing the order in which ethX's were labelled.
This new mechanism completely solves the problem by relying on long-standing standards.
Domsch: Consistent Network Device Naming coming to Fedora 15 Posted Jan 27, 2011 20:19 UTC (Thu) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link]
I fully agree, I thought the same when reading it.
Well, actually I thought that "emX" would be used only as a suffix to "eth".
Alex
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