Matt Domsch wrote:
On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 03:36:06PM -0400, Bill Davidsen wrote:
Arjan van de Ven wrote:
Maybe the kernel's initial ordering should do a numeric sort by mac
address or something.. (or userspace should)
That wouldn't match any existing setup, and would be subject to mid-list
insertions if a NIC were added/replaced. And that is fragile.
I was looking for an easy way to do PCI slot to MAC, and from there MAC
to IP, so any NIC plugged into a given slot could be called eth0 (for
instance) and given the "right" IP address, but that's not easy. Can be
done with some searching in /sys, but it's non-trivial.
So, I did almost this in
userspace. http://linux.dell.com/files/name_eths/. It uses the PCI
IRQ Routing table to determine if a PCI device is embedded on the
motherboard, or is in an add-in slot, and if so, which slot. It
orders the list of thereby possible PCI NICs with all the embeddeds
first, in ascending PCI breadth-first order, then orders all the
add-in NICs in PCI slot number ascending order, subsort PCI
breadth-first for those nifty multiport cards. It rewrites
modprobe.conf to load network drivers 'proper' order and outputs an
/etc/mactab file that can be used by the second half of the script to
write HWADDR lines into Red Hat-style ifcfg-eth* files, and into
openSuSE udev ethernet rules file.
I am not (generally) concerned with the embedded NICs, it's the slots I
have had bite me. I do see what you're doing, although I didn't do it
quite the same way.
This works great, until you add another NIC into an add-in slot
somewhere in the middle (e.g. you have 2 embedded NICs eth0 and eth1,
and a NIC card in PCI slot 4 eth2, then at some later point you add a
NIC card into PCI slot 2). You either have to manually configure a
name for the new card, or run name_eths again and expect the NIC in
PCI slot 2 to become eth2, and the one in slot4 to become eth3.
And this is why I want to do a slot to name translation, which may
result in gaps in the names. That doesn't seem to matter. Then I can put
a label over the slot, like "public" or "private" and know that adding
another NIC, or replacing a failed NIC will leave my labels intact.
The pure C udev helper I'm working on behaves similarly, though would
negate the need to edit config files, as it assigns a name "on the
fly" at device discovery time.
For the relatively rare cases of adding a NIC, I'm OK with this. I
don't have a better way to handle it, but am open to ideas.
You have mine. I tried putting labels on the NIC, but the machine go to
live timezones away and repairs are done by whoever has the service
contract.
We could assign names like eth-embedded-1, eth-embedded-2,
eth-slot2-1, eth-slot4-1 if we wanted to change how people think of
ethernet names (and this would be similar to how large network
switches work: blade N, port M. We've got 15 usable chars in the name
after all...
Opens the door for change, for sure. Since I have had to use multi-drop
NICs and nameset like e_slot1_jack2 is an interesting concept. Or
perhaps just append the jack index no matter how many connections it
has. So eth2-0 would be a NIC and socket. Then when I run out of slots
and have to go to a two or four post card, the primary name wouldn't change.
Your idea has just enough usefulness to be dangerous ;-) Thanks.
--
bill davidsen <[email protected]>
CTO TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979
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