Re: Naming of network devices - how to improve it in buster

[Matt Zagrabelny <mzagrabe@d.umn.edu>]

On Tue, Jul 11, 2017 at 10:12 AM, Samuel Thibault <sthibault@debian.org> wrote:

Matt Zagrabelny, on mar. 11 juil. 2017 09:53:58 -0500, wrote:
>     Relatedly, network device name lengths are limited to the length of some
>     arbitrarily-sized struct field in the kernel ABI,
>
> Feature request to bump the size of of interface names struct? Any reason to
> not do so?

One reason is that it's already compiled in a lot of applications
through the IFNAMSIZ and IF_NAMESIZE macros (8155 and 939 results in
codesearch), so a lot of software would suddently break on interfaces
with long names until recompiled.

Thanks for the input.

This particular thread isn't the first time I've heard commentary regarding the interface name size in the kernel data structure.

I'm not sure what a sensible limit is, but 16 (or 15) seems a little on the small side. Even Cisco has longer names than the Linux limit:

echo -n "TenGigabitEthernet1/0/24" | wc -c

24

-m

 

Samuel