Fedora 15 Changes Network Device Naming Scheme

dkd903 writes "Fedora developer Matt Domsch has announced that Fedora 15 is breaking the conventional ethX naming scheme used for Ethernet devices by adopting a new scheme called Consistent Network Device Naming. The ethX naming scheme works fine as long as the system has only one Ethernet port. However if there are more than one Ethernet ports, the actual problem starts."

Comments

False

[Issarlk]

"However if there are more than one Ethernet ports, a sort of race condition develops at every system boot and the ports may get their names in an arbitrary order"

Wrong, udev handles this very fine. This is a complicated solution to a non-problem.

Re:False

[msauve]

There are multiple issues, some of which have already been solved:

Persistency: once eth0, always eth0 - this is what most commentators here seem to think this is all about, but it's already taken care of by udev with most modern distributions.

Enumeration: Lacking previous knowledge, the order in which interfaces are enumerated. I would think this would be deterministic, but you say it's random (what is "semi-random?"). I'll take your word for it. It seems this is the problem they're trying to address. MAC addresses are indeed useless for this, in a general case, since we may be trying to enumerate ports on plug in boards (e.g. there's no guarantee the MAC in slot 1 will be lower than the MAC in slot 2).

Naming: The article says they're changing the naming. This is what makes no sense. It's not "required." ethx is just fine, as long as the names are enumerated consistently (meaning that on two "identical" boxes, the order is identical based on physical port).