On Fri, 2008-05-23 at 22:46 +0200, Jan Engelhardt wrote:

On Friday 2008-05-23 21:06, Jon Masters wrote:

quoted

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bus-info: 0000:00:19.0

And if it happens to be in a hotplug slot today with a suitable hotplug 
module (term?) loaded like acpiphp you can then map that to a more human 
friendly slot number/name.  In the future, once Alex Chiang's pci slots 
patches make it to mainline it will be possible even with non-hotplug slots.

Yep, that's all great until the bus topology changes underneath you.
There is a need for alias support, because it will allow distributions
to assign a name based upon the *slot ordering specified by the vendor*
and therefore allow a consistent slot number no matter what hotplug
happens, what devices are added or removed, which devices are on-board
vs. in cards, and even (eventually) for non-PCI cards.

In the case of Fedora, right now, we have files:

ifcfg-eth<whatever>

While it's gone now, openSUSE had support for ifcfg-bus-pci-0000:00:19.0
in versions prior to 10.3. I suggest you kindly ask they reinstate it
because with Fedora it is probably not going to happen that they
bus-pci-.. gets added in the first place.

Yes but *that isn't what I'm talking about* :)

That doesn't infer the physical ordering of the devices on the back of
the machine, does it? How do I know which device is labeled "0" on the
back of the machine, and in the vendor documentation? The answer is,
because they added a DMI extension to tell us this information. So let's
please stop thinking about physical bus ordering and instead view this
as a simple problem of wanting to add an alias based on what the vendor
reports should be the ordering of the devices in the system :)

Jon.