Systemd 197 released

Posted Jan 8, 2013 22:54 UTC (Tue) by mezcalero (subscriber, #45103)
In reply to: Systemd 197 released by DarrenJThompson
Parent article: Systemd 197 released

No, network interfaces cannot have alias names. This is different from device nodes in /dev where we can add as many alias names via symlinks as we want while leaving the primary kernel name intact (and which is what udev does). For network interfaces we can only control one name and one name only. If people wrote their stuff with ethX names in mind, then they should just not use the new naming policy.

Systemd 197 released

Posted Jan 8, 2013 23:01 UTC (Tue) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (4 responses)

Could the kernel be changed to allow this, or is that too messy?

Systemd 197 released

Posted Jan 9, 2013 0:20 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

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.