Only if it's augmented by additional device IDs, such as the
"what 's the physical connection for this interface" sort of
primitive that's been mentioned.
> Nothing to do with the kernel but, one should then argue that the
> current stuff in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts is broken for hotplug as
> placing a new network adapter into your bus will renumber your interfaces
> causing them to be ifconfig'd wrongly.
Not just hotplug -- any configuration where these identifiers
can change "meaning" (which physical device?) over time.
For example, adding/removing/swapping hardware does it too.
> You'd want to associate the IP
> configuration stuff with the particular network interface, by MAC address.
Bob Glamm had the right sort of idea: if the kernel is going
to be assigning tool-visible device names, the tools need to
have and use additional device metadata, perhaps like this:
> # start up networking
> for i in eth0 eth1 eth2; do
> identify device $i
> get configuration/config procedure for device $i identity
> configure $i
> done
In fact that "identify" step is probably worth enabling for EVERY (!)
device, not just network interfaces. (Which, since they don't show
up with major/minor device numbers today, are perhaps a bit offtopic
for the original thrust of this thread ... :)
I suppose that for network interface names, some convention for
interface ioctls would suffice to solve that "identify" step. PCI
devices would return the slot_name, USB devices need something
like a patch I posted to linux-usb-devel a few months back.
- Dave
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