Re: again, nic driver order

[Ross Walker <rswwalker@xxxxxxxxx>]

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

On Sat, Nov 28, 2009 at 2:55 PM, Ross Walker <rswwalker@xxxxxxxxx> 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

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