On Wed, Jun 22, 2016 at 10:35:39AM +0200, Stephan Seitz wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 22, 2016 at 08:08:38AM +0100, Simon Hobson wrote:
> >But once you go down the route of udev (or equivalent, eg vdev) and
> >persistent rules, then "eth0" is just a subset of "admin set interface
> >name".
>
> The problem with udev and eth0 is, that you have race conditions if you let
> udev rename the interfaces with names from the kernel space. I have seen
> these race conditions more than once.

As no other tool can safely use these interfaces during their
initialization, these races can be trivially worked around by retrying.

> So it is a good idea to use names that the kernel is not using.

When there's a meaningful reason for naming, yeah. I for one use out0,
lan0 and lan1 on one of my servers.

But when there's only one interface -- ie, on a vast majority of server
machines, it is valuable to use a predictable name. This one being eth0 --
this way, anyone who comes knows what to expect without having to check.
This reduces confusion, akin to, say, shared C indent/brace style.

--
An imaginary friend squared is a real enemy.