David Miller wrote:

From: Matt Domsch <redacted>
Date: Tue, 24 Mar 2009 10:46:17 -0500

quoted

Problem: Users expect on-motherboard NICs to be named eth0..ethN.
This can be difficult to achieve.

I learned a long time ago that eth0 et al. have zero meaning.

If the system firmware folks gave us topology information with respect
to these things, we could export something that tools such as
NetworkManager, iproute2, etc. could use.

<snip>

I guess it's easier to spew about MAC addresses and other
irrelevant topics than try to solve this problem properly. :-)

What about things like USB network adapters where the topology is not 
fixed?  Presumably we would want to use some sort of unique identifier, 
and the MAC comes to mind.  Of course, then you run into the problem of 
how to deal with duplicate MACs.

Chris