On Sat, 24 May 2008 00:25:55 -0400
Jon Masters [off-list ref] wrote:

On Sat, 2008-05-24 at 00:54 +0200, Thomas Graf wrote:

quoted

* Jon Masters [off-list ref] 2008-05-23 15:06

quoted

My intention is to also allow for:

ifcfg-slot_<whatever>

Where the configuration is based entirely upon what vendor <XYZ> says is
the first, second, or third card. Then, those who want to use the older
names can continue to do so, but those who prefer to base their
configuration upon the order the vendor states, can do so.

I'd propose to extend the netlink configuration interface, f.e. introduce a
new netlink attribtue IFLA_SLOT which can be provided to select the device
to be changed based on the slot number instead of the name/ifindex. That
would also make it trivial to write a small app using RTM_GETLINK to
translate a slot number to the corresponding interface name.

I guess that would also work quite nicely for what I want to do, but the
problem is that this will require either:

*). The kernel decodes the DMI extension directly.
*). We can first inform each device which slot it is in (set the slot).

My intention is to implement whatever seems reasonable, and my reason
for asking is that I am not a networking maintainer, so I want to know
what seems reasonable :)

Cheers,

Jon.

If it is a physical device /sys/class/net/ethX/device is a link to
the actual device entry is /sys.



In newer kernels the contents /sys/class/net is just symlinks.