On Fri, Jan 31, 2020 at 09:39:37AM -0500, Dan Ritter wrote:
Michael Stone wrote:
As a programmer you should be concerned with making sure that the packets go
in and out of the correct physical hardware. If the name doesn't relate to
the physical harder that's a harder problem to solve. You (and everyone
else) could reimplement that in software at a higher level, or accept that
this is something the OS should help with.
Maybe we should ask the OS to actually help, instead of
"helping" us.
For example, the OS knows when it is being installed. At install
time, it could enumerate NICs and assign them permanent names
based on the MAC addresses: eth0, eth1...
It's been tried, and has other problems. (As you trimmed from the
original email.)
When an unrecognized device is plugged in, whether during runtime or at
boot time, it gets the next sequential permanent name.
Which also has its own problems. (Is it "eth0" the old kernel version or
"eth0" the renamed version? Don't worry, it's really easy to explain the
difference to someone having problems on a mailing list.)
All of this would be, I think, 999999% better than what we have now.
And yet, it wasn't. :) Maybe with the stuff you described that doesn't
exist that you think should get written (by someone) it would be better,
but we don't know since it hasn't been written. Even if it was written
it wouldn't be reliably available for several kernel & OS releases
because compatibility and upgrades.
Really, if there was a simple solution that worked better than the
existing solution for all cases, it would get used. Since it isn't,
there may be reasons...