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

From: Ben Hutchings <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2009 16:33:13 +0100

On Fri, 2009-10-16 at 09:20 -0600, dann frazier wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 07:32:50PM +0530, [email-masked] wrote:
[...]
> > And how would the regular file look like in terms of holding ifindex of
> > the interface, which can be passed to libnetdevname.
> 
> I can't think of anything we need to store in the regular file. If we
> have the kernel name for the device, we can look up the ifindex in
> /sys. Correct me if I'm wrong, but storing it ourselves seems
> redundant.

But the name of a netdev can change whereas its ifindex never does.
Identifying netdevs by name would require additional work to update the
links when a netdev is renamed and would still be prone to race
conditions.  This is why Narendra and Matt were proposing to store the
ifindex in the node all along...

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.