On Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 08:43:44PM +0530, Narendra_K@Dell.com wrote:

quoted

quoted

This way the kernel has only one name, and so does userspace, and 
everyone is happy.

There are two issues, which really seem distinct to me.

Users expect eth0 to map to first-onboard-nic. That's an 
installer issue (since the BIOS can already export this info) 
and I agree that if we want to "fix" that, we should fix it there.

I agree that installers have to be fixed in the sense that they can be
told to find the right interface. But, they expect determinism and
depend on "eth0 to map to first-onboard-nic". Installer is one of the
applications that is affected by this and needs user intervention, if it
is not told about the right interface. I discussed installer as it is so
much part of a user experience.

Right, but couldn't the installer do the work of scanning the SMBIOS
to figure out which nics are onboard, and reorder the 'eth*' names
such that these are first? This state could then be written out as
udev rules so that they persist across reboots.

But the real issue is "eth0 does not map to first-onboard-nic" always
and applications expecting this would break in data center environments.
Both the solutions proposed provide a way to overcome it without
introducing state.

With regards,
Narendra K

-- 
dann frazier