Posted Jan 9, 2013 0:20 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)
[Link]
It's a long-standing issue in Linux (and UNIX). Network devices live in a completely separate namespace from the 'general' devices.
There's also a special API to interact with them which actually uses device _indexes_, not names. As far as I remember, there was not even a way to lookup index by name - one has to enumerate all the devices and get their names using SIOCGIFNAME (though I might be mistaken here).
It's a legacy mess, in short.
Systemd 197 released
Posted Jan 9, 2013 7:36 UTC (Wed) by dankamongmen (subscriber, #35141)
[Link]
Nowadays one would use netlink, but yeah, same deal.
Systemd 197 released
Posted Jan 10, 2013 10:10 UTC (Thu) by justincormack (subscriber, #70439)
[Link]
If_name to index(3) which is an ioctl will do it without enumeration. And net link can use names...
Systemd 197 released
Posted Jan 9, 2013 0:29 UTC (Wed) by mezcalero (subscriber, #45103)
[Link]
People have considered that, but it's not that easy unfortunately.