On Tue, Jun 27, 2006 at 09:38:14PM -0600, Eric W. Biederman wrote:

Alexey Kuznetsov [off-list ref] writes:

quoted

Hello!

quoted

It may look weird, but do application really *need* to see eth0 rather
than eth858354?

Applications do not care, humans do. :-)

What's about applications they just need to see exactly the same
device after migration. Not only name, but f.e. also its ifindex.
If you do not create a separate namespace for netdevices, you will
inevitably end up with some strange hack sort of VPIDs to translate
(or to partition) ifindices or to tell that "ping -I eth858354 xxx"
is too coimplicated application to survive migration.

Actually there are applications with peculiar licensing practices that
do look at devices like eth0 to verify you have the appropriate mac, and
do really weird things if you don't have an eth0.

Plus there are other cases where it can be simpler to hard code things
if it is allowable. (The human factor)  Otherwise your configuration
must be done through hotplug scripts.

But yes there are misguided applications that care.

last time I pointed to such 'misguided' apps which 
made assumptions that are not necessarily true
inside a virtual environment (e.g. pstree, initpid)
the general? position was that those apps should
be fixed instead adding a 'workaround'

note: personally I'm absolutely not against virtualizing
the device names so that each guest can have a separate
name space for devices, but there should be a way to
'see' _and_ 'identify' the interfaces from outside
(i.e. host or spectator context)

best,
Herbert

Eric