Quoting marc (marcxdv@???):

> Like Rick I haven't encountered a spontaneous device name
> re-order in the wild.

Just to be skeptical for a moment of my own wording, I probably
_slightly_ overstated (at least by implication) what I've observed over
the decades, here:

I understood that, if you had a motherboard with dual e1000 NICs and
suddenly added (or removed) a third ethernet port on a PCI-E card,
whether it was also an e1000 NIC or not, you might expect to get a
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
device assignment reshuffle.

On reflection, I'm not sure I've ever seen, say, a server with a pair of
e1000 NICs on the motherboard supplemented by an ethernet card with a
Tigon tg3 chipset. In my own systems, and the ones I've used at work,
we've always stuck with a single NIC chipset by preference, just on
instinct. If you needed a third NIC on a dual-e1000 host, you plugged
in an e1000 card.

But honestly, I think this whole situation almost never arises in my own
experience. In business, if you have a situation where dual-NIC
motherboards don't suffice, you typically need a dedicated router, not a
regular Linux host.

I stand by my observation that a machine with multiple copies of the
same NIC, especially (as we find for the last decade or so) they're
integrated into the motherboard, you do _not_ see spontaneous
device-assignment reshuffles. If it happens, I've never seen it,
anyway.