On 5/2/2011 9:58 AM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
But, yes, a different way of looking at NICs is coming down the pipe.
It's about
time.
EGADS Why? After working with FreeBSD for ten years it so nice not to
have to worry
is this rl0, vr0, em0, fxp0, bge0, ed0, etc in networking scripts. Why
would you
want to go back to that?
The numbers chosen in the eth? scheme are more or less randomized even
on identical hardware, so it is pretty much impossible to prepare a disk
<snip> Anybody know *why*? Is it based on the order of response of the NIC firmware? Certainly, were I writing the code, I'd have based it on the bus address.
I think the 2.4 kernel did it that way, and was single-threaded during detection. At least I seldom had problems omitting the HWADDR= setting from ifcfg-eth? files and moving disks to a different chassis. My impression was that 2.6 tries to do device detection in parallel to speed up booting and thus makes the order unpredictable. As I recall, there was a bug in early RHEL/Centos 5.x versions where the HWADDR= setting was ignored if it was wrong, fixed in an update that made the interface not come up at all. That made for fun times after the update/reboot on remote machines...