Re: Proposal: enable stateless persistant network interface names

[Thomas Goirand <zigo@debian.org>]

On 06/30/2015 12:14 AM, Vincent Bernat wrote:
>  ❦ 29 juin 2015 22:29 +0200, Thomas Goirand <zigo@debian.org> :
> 
>>>> So your proposal is: if the default is unusable (like above), then the
>>>> poor user has to find a way to fix that... I'm not convince that this is
>>>> what we want. I'd very much prefer a usable default.
>>> Me too, but there is none that we can use.
>>
>> Sure there is: keep the good old ethX naming, which has always worked
>> for many, many years. Now, expecting someone will raise the fact that
>> sometimes, we get a different order of the ifaces. Well, there's many
>> ways around that, the persistent naming file is one solution (which I
>> don't like, as I think it shouldn't be written by default, it should be
>> the user's decision to write it if he wants to, but hey, let's not
>> discuss that...).
> 
> It has worked for many many years as long as the drivers were loaded
> synchronously. This is not the case anymore. When you have two brands of
> network card (for example bnx2 and e1000, quite common on HP servers),
> at each boot, you can get something different. And while the persistent
> naming file is a solution that worked almost all the time, there was
> some time where an interface were renamed to "renameXX" due to a naming
> conflict with the kernel.
> 
> An alternative would be to use something like "emX". Only the first boot
> would be "random" which might prove complex when deploying on a large
> cluster of identical nodes.
> 
> This has already been explained in this very same thread.

Thanks for explaining it again. I have to admit I didn't have time to
read the (huge) thread entirely.

Cheers,

Thomas