On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 10:01:16AM -0500, Matt Domsch wrote:

On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 05:16:46PM -0700, Stephen Hemminger wrote:

quoted

On Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:03:23 -0500

On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 05:16:46PM -0700, Stephen Hemminger wrote:

quoted

Is it really a good idea to have to change every utility that could
alter network devices?  There is iproute2, iputils, tcpdump, wireshark,
quagga, snmp, ...  Many of the utilities come from a BSD world,
and will be less likely to accept some Linux specific wart.

I agree, I don't want to have to change all those userspace apps
either.  We've started creating patches and are willing to do so if it
will yield the result we want though.
 

quoted

I have lost faith in this library wrapper support everywhere method.
Let's just keep the firmware stuff in udev. If the user wants to
have a policy that renames device from eth0 to "Embedded BIOS LAN1" then
do it in udev. Or if you want to keep the ethX naming convention
and stuff the firmware label into ifAlias or other sysfs field
so it can be displayed that will be not a big issue.

1) we remain constrained to IFNAMSIZ named arguments.  There is no
   such constraint on BIOS-provided names.  Dell BIOS presently uses
   'Embedded NIC 1' which (fortunately) is 14 chars. We're cutting it
   awfully close already.  I can't dictate to non-Dell BIOS vendors
   what to use as their strings, or how long to make them.

vlan usage requires 5 characters from IFNAMSIZ (eth0.4095).  So my
example with 'Embedded NIC 1' plus a vlan doesn't fit.

-- 
Matt Domsch
Technology Strategist
Dell | Office of the CTO