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Re: What happened to network devices?



In <[🔎] 20090603155614.GV1901@cat.rubenette.is-a-geek.com>, lee wrote:
>It always turned eth0 into eth1 for me, extremely annoying. 

This is a result of an attempt to make interface names persistent by tying 
them to MAC addresses.  It falls on its face often.  There really needs to 
be some sort of symlink system for network interfaces so we can have 
multiple names for a single interface -- it would make this less likely to 
fail badly.

>I know,
>udev is seriously broken. It can also confuse your hard disks and thus
>cause data loss.

udev doesn't do this.  Instead udev is the *fix* for this.

What "confuses your hard disks" is the asynchronous hardware probing done by 
the kernel.  This causes disks to be detected more quickly but not always in 
the same order.  Even before the asynchronous probing code was mainlined, 
/dev/[hs]d* has always been about detection order -- never a persistent name 
for the device that could be counted on between boot.  Changing your 
hardware (e.g. booting with a USB stick in), kernel (changing the module 
link order or which modules are compiled in vs. as a module), or initrd 
(changing the module load order) could end up "renaming" your devices.

udev allows more consistent naming.  The default setup for /dev/disk/by-* 
gives good results for most people.

>So where is /dev/eth0?

Nowhere.  The 2.6.x kernel does not assign a major/minor number to network 
interfaces.  If you'd like this changed, please contact the kernel 
developers.
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