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Domsch: Consistent Network Device Naming coming to Fedora 15

Domsch: Consistent Network Device Naming coming to Fedora 15

Posted Jan 27, 2011 7:05 UTC (Thu) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)
In reply to: Domsch: Consistent Network Device Naming coming to Fedora 15 by butlerm
Parent article: Domsch: Consistent Network Device Naming coming to Fedora 15

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.


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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.

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