Subject: Re: [RFC] Stable interface index option

From: Stephen Hemminger <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2015 08:06:52 -0800

On Tue, 01 Dec 2015 17:02:23 +0100
Hannes Frederic Sowa <[email-masked]> wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 1, 2015, at 16:50, Maximilian Wilhelm wrote:
> > > I'm not sure I understand how this would work- are we going to 
> > > pin down the ifindex for some subset of interfaces?
> > 
> > I'm not sure what your idea is, but I guess we might mean the same
> > thing:
> > 
> > What I have in mind is that the user can supply a list of (ifname ->
> > ifindex) entries via a sysfs/procfs interface and if such a list is
> > present, the kernel will search the list for every ifname which is
> > registered and check if there is an entry. If there is, the ifindex
> > for this entry is used. If there is no entry found for the given
> > ifname, the usual algorithm is used (therefore inherently providing
> > backward compatibility).
> 
> Sorry to ask because I don't like this feature at all. There was a lot
> of work on stable interface names. Why do you need stable ifindexes,
> which were never meant to be stable for a longer amount of time?

Also current versions of SNMP provide more useful information about
network interface slot information in ifDescription