Subject: Re: PATCH: Network Device Naming mechanism and policy

From: Ben Hutchings <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:31:56 +0100

On Mon, 2009-10-12 at 11:41 +0100, Scott James Remnant wrote:
> On Fri, 2009-10-09 at 09:51 -0500, Matt Domsch wrote:
> 
> > As has been noted here, MAC addresses are not necessarily unique to an
> > interface.  As such, we are not proposing a net/by-mac/* symlink to
> > /dev/netdev/*.
> > 
> On the other hand, they *tend* to be unique for a wide range of systems.
> This makes them pretty comparable to LABELs on disks, and we have
> a /dev/disk/by-label
[...]

MAC addresses are normally assigned automatically but can be overridden
if necessary.  In that respect they are more like UUIDs for disks.

I don't see any analogue of disk labels, though labels could conceivably
be added to some NICs using VPD.

Ben.

-- 
Ben Hutchings, Senior Software Engineer, Solarflare Communications
Not speaking for my employer; that's the marketing department's job.
They asked us to note that Solarflare product names are trademarked.