[CentOS] again, nic driver order

[Ross Walker]

On Nov 29, 2009, at 3:27 AM, Rob Townley <rob.townley at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 2:55 PM, Ross Walker <rswwalker at gmail.com>  
> wrote:
>>
>> There was a kernel update maybe the move from C4 to C5 which caused
>> grief with Dell hardware, where it reversed the order Broadcom  
>> devices
>> are detected, still does and needs manual swapping around after  
>> install.
>>
>
> NIC ordering is a problem. Some say it is the multi cpu, some say bad
> BIOS, some say MAC address ordering is better, some say PCI bus
> enumeration is better.  The netdev mailing list has had a long running
> discussion on this issue.  The CTO of Dell and members of HP along
> with others are / were active participants.  Part of the problem is
> that an alias name may not be available to the kernel.
>
> Dell has their own software to bring determinism to NIC ordering.
> http://linux.dell.com/papers.shtml
>
> One of Dell's programmers has proposed changing Anaconda to let you
> choose at installation time the NIC naming convention:
>
> We have been having discussions in the netdev list about creating
> multiple names for the network interfaces to bring determinism into
> the way network interfaces are named in the OSes. In specific, "eth0
> in the OS does not always map to the integrated NIC Gb1 as labelled on
> the chassis".
>
> http://marc.info/?l=linux-netdev&m=125510301513312&w=2 - (Re: PATCH:
> Network Device Naming mechanism and policy)
> http://marc.info/?l=linux-netdev&m=125619338904322&w=2 - ([PATCH]
> udev: create empty regular files to represent net)

It's good to hear it's being worked on, but I kinda wish they would  
revert to the older NIC enumeration method which seemed to get the  
ordering right.

-Ross

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.centos.org/pipermail/centos/attachments/20091129/f33fd261/attachment.html>