[systemd-devel] network interface renaming via PCI ID w/ systemd-udevd

[Jordan Hargrave]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 12:44 PM, Filipe Brandenburger
<filbranden at google.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 10:13 AM, Matthew Hall <mhall at mhcomputing.net> wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 12, 2015 at 10:37:56AM +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
>>> Since time began eth* is where the kernel automatically picked iface
>>> names from. If you want to assign your own names go for some other
>>> namespace, or be prepared to race against the kernel, and deal with
>>> it.
>>
>> Again, this logic worked well when the level of dynamism was lower.
>
> I think I see where you're coming from... Some distributions (in my
> recollection, RHEL) would use weird tricks to keep interface ordering
> stable while still keeping the eth0, eth1, ethX names.
>
> If I recall correctly, RHEL's /etc/init.d/network would try to match
> interface names from /etc/sysconfig/networking-scripts/ifcfg-ethX to
> the MAC address listed inside that configuration file. If it had to
> switch it from, say, eth0 to eth1, it would do weird tricks such as
> looking whether eth1 existed already, then rename it to tmp98765 with
> a random number, then rename eth0 to eth1. In many cases, something
> would go awry and you would end up with an interface named tmp98765.
>
> As you can imagine, this was fraught with problems and race
> conditions. It doesn't really work when you're trying to boot with as
> much parallelism (which is something we aim for these days) or even
> hot plug new interfaces...
>
>> But now the level of dynamism is higher and different principles should apply.
>
> Yes. I'd say that's a good thing.
>
>> You aren't thinking very much about how it will work for newer users.
>
> New users mostly don't care... I really think retraining your fingers
> from eth -> enp or whatever you pick, net, lan, wired, etc. is
> probably much easier than trying to preserve a relic of a name that
> mostly serves no purpose these days... As mentioned, keeping it is not
> simple since it's still the dumping ground for the kernel (and that's
> unlikely to change), avoiding the race with the kernel is much better
> than trying to deal with it, the complexity is just not worth it... I
> hope you get to see the light!
>
> Cheers!
> Filipe
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I'm the primary developer of biosdevname, used by RedHat/Fedora for
consistent naming.

Servers using SR-IOV can have potentially hundreds of NIC devices, all
loaded in parallel.
eth* is still the internal name used by the kernel, and the number
gets assigned first-come first-served.   Trying to keep consistent
eth* names without collision here is impossible.  The eth* device name
then gets changed by systemd or biosdevname.