On Fri, Jan 31, 2020 at 09:39:37AM -0500, Dan Ritter wrote:
Michael Stone wrote:As a programmer you should be concerned with making sure that the packets go in and out of the correct physical hardware. If the name doesn't relate to the physical harder that's a harder problem to solve. You (and everyone else) could reimplement that in software at a higher level, or accept that this is something the OS should help with.Maybe we should ask the OS to actually help, instead of "helping" us. For example, the OS knows when it is being installed. At install time, it could enumerate NICs and assign them permanent names based on the MAC addresses: eth0, eth1...
It's been tried, and has other problems. (As you trimmed from the original email.)
When an unrecognized device is plugged in, whether during runtime or at boot time, it gets the next sequential permanent name.
Which also has its own problems. (Is it "eth0" the old kernel version or "eth0" the renamed version? Don't worry, it's really easy to explain the difference to someone having problems on a mailing list.)
All of this would be, I think, 999999% better than what we have now.
And yet, it wasn't. :) Maybe with the stuff you described that doesn't exist that you think should get written (by someone) it would be better, but we don't know since it hasn't been written. Even if it was written it wouldn't be reliably available for several kernel & OS releases because compatibility and upgrades. Really, if there was a simple solution that worked better than the existing solution for all cases, it would get used. Since it isn't, there may be reasons...