On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 11:42:57AM -0500, Karl O. Pinc wrote: > My thoughts on the subject; from someone who is not > particularly qualified to have opinions. > > Reading over your post, I searched for a single sentence describing > the problem you're trying to solve. What I came up with was > this: > > On 03/24/2009 10:46:17 AM, Matt Domsch wrote: > > > Users continue to have to figure out, for each system type > >and > >potentially for each boot, which NIC is connected to which name. This > >has been the #1 customer complaint about Linux on Dell servers for > >several years. I'd prefer not to keep it this way. yeah, that's pretty much it. > Perhaps a little magic in the udev rule that creates the > z70_persistent-net-rules file would solve the basic problem. > It could sort the nics by mac address when creating the > names. It need only run when the z70 file does not exist. > I presume this would produce consistent results in most cases > and it feels technically feasible; although I am not > fully qualified to make that judgment. > > Rather that put the onus on udev to make the above > change Dell could just run a little program at first > boot that mungs the z70 file as desired. (It could then > force a reboot; I forget if this would be needed.) > I imagine Dell boots the boxes once at the factory, nearly all dell systems running linux in the world were not factory-installed with that os. this isn't something i can simply patch in our factories. it needs to be fixed as far upstream as possible. > but if not then the user has to suffer with a longer > boot process at first boot. because this is driven > by dell, dell would know exactly what nic has what > name. and dell knows what nics are on the mobo and > what are not, and so can control the mac address sort > order as desired. well, there is no "mac address sort" anywhere. (nor is that really a good algorithm to use). > The other solution that screams out at me is to ditch > those legacy BIOSes and go to something like LinuxBIOS. > Again, I'm not really qualified, but it sure feels like > there's an answer in this approach. It's not a BIOS problem. BIOS can inform the OS of what it thinks about hardware location, names, etc. And our PowerEdge (9G and newer) servers do - using SMBIOS 2.6 standard features we added (types 9, 10, and 41) to the specification - exactly to allow such. Now something needs to use that information. That something today is biosdevname, which could be more cleanly integrated with udev. > The other point that struck me was that sometimes, it seems, > users want persistence in the naming of their network devices > and sometimes they want device names based on bus position. indeed > The sucky thing is that symlinks and nics don't mix well > and so it seems impossible to satisfy both the above > requirements at the same time. This is an area that > IMHO could be better addressed by the Linux community. correct. -- Matt Domsch Linux Technology Strategist, Dell Office of the CTO linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-hotplug" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
