On 5/2/2011 11:19 AM, Steve Clark wrote:
>
>>> 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...
>>
> Trying to save a few seconds when rebooting a server seems pointless to
> me. It is not as if this is something
> that happens with a great deal of frequency.
The Linux kernel is also used in laptops/desktops and isn't great at
sleep/hibernate (or at least wasn't when this change was introduced), so
I can see the value in a fast boot but it would have been nice to have a
boot option to use the more predictable 2.4 approach when you need it.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com