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Eth0 no more?

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Re: Eth0 no more?

#2
From the limitations section of the wiki page linked in the article:

Not all add-in cards have a method to expose their Linux interface name(s) to external port mapping. biosdevname may provide incorrect names for such. Discussions are ongoing on the netdev mailing list to standardize a method of exposing such mapping.

Seems like this would be kind of a deal-breaker for any wholesale move like this. I'd be fairly surprised if this got any widespread adoption anytime soon.

Re: Eth0 no more?

#5
post #3

Looks like this could solve the problem of network interfaces renaming themselves after reboots. Hooray!

There are a lot of other solutions to that. The Ububuntu one I favored in the 8.x era was /etc/iftab, it's a shame they retired it in favor of udev.

While udev is more universal, iftab felt elegant and unixy.

Re: Eth0 no more?

#6
Mac OS X and Linux are the only OS's that I'm aware of that put all ethernet nics in the same device namespace.

Everyone else has separate device namespaces for - you might have an fxp0 , rl0, hme0, etc. on any BSD or Solaris machine.

Rather than looking in /dev, they really ought to be parsing the output of ifconfig -a.

Re: Eth0 no more?

#7
post #3

Looks like this could solve the problem of network interfaces renaming themselves after reboots. Hooray!

Network interfaces should not rename themselves after reboots. On Red Hat derived distributions, the device name is tied to the MAC address of the interface, so it never changes.

On other distributions, "udev" accomplishes the same thing.

The only point when interface naming is arbitrary is at installation time, then it stays the same forever.

Not only this will add confusion by introducing a bunch of new names for network interfaces, it will also break applications that rely on them being called "ethX".

It will also make it impossible to manually assign names to interfaces. For instance, if you have a configuration that uses an embedded interface and you want to add another interface on a card, you can manually assign the same "ethX" name to it, but not if the names depend on the physical characteristics of the hardware.

Re: Eth0 no more?

#8
post #6

Mac OS X and Linux are the only OS's that I'm aware of that put all ethernet nics in the same device namespace. Everyone else has separate device namespaces for - you might have an fxp0 , rl0, hme0, etc. on any BSD or Solaris machine. Rather than looking in /dev, they really ought to be parsing the output of ifconfig -a .

Having all ethernet devices called "ethX" makes it much easier to parse the output of ifconfig and exclude any non-ethernet interfaces (tunnels and such).

Re: Eth0 no more?

#9
post #2

From the limitations section of the wiki page linked in the article: Not all add-in cards have a method to expose their Linux interface name(s) to external port mapping. biosdevname may provide incorrect names for such. Discussions are ongoing on the netdev mailing list to standardize a method of exposing such mapping. Seems like this would be kind of a deal-breaker for any wholesale move like this. I'd be fairly sur…

Looks like this https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ConsistentNetworkDev... is going to be the default in Fedora 15.

Re: Eth0 no more?

#10
post #7
post #3

Looks like this could solve the problem of network interfaces renaming themselves after reboots. Hooray!

Network interfaces should not rename themselves after reboots. On Red Hat derived distributions, the device name is tied to the MAC address of the interface, so it never changes. On other distributions, "udev" accomplishes the same thing. The only point when interface naming is arbitrary is at installation time, then it stays the same forever. Not only this will add confusion by introducing a bunch of new names for n…

> Network interfaces should not rename themselves after reboots.

But that's because PCI bus walk order doesn't change across reboots.

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