Proposal: enable stateless persistant network interface names

[peter green]

>
> The main downside is that by nature the device names are not familiar
> to current admins yet. For BIOS provided names you get e. g. ens0, for
> PCI slot names enp1s1 (ethernet) or wlp3s0 (wlan). But that's a
> necessary price to pay (biosdevname names look similar).
The stability of these names appears to be an illusion.

The "path based names" use the PCI bus number as their "root". PCI bus 
numbers are dynamically allocated as the bios enumerates the busses. 
Other than the root PCI bus they aren't a fundamental chactertistic of 
the hardware. Installing or removing an expansion card can add or remove 
"PCI busses" from the system and hence risks changing bus numbers. I'm 
sure I even recall one case of a laptop with switchable graphics where 
switching graphics setup changed the PCI bus numbers.

Someone else has raised concerns about the stability of bios based names 
over bios updates.

I feel this change is likely to make things better for companies that 
want to deploy images to loads of identical machines and rarely modify a 
system but worse for those of us with more ad-hoc hardware arrangements. 
The current system really works quite well for individual machines with 
ad-hoc changes, my interfaces have consistent easy to remember names 
regardless of where I plug them in and if I do have to replace an 
interface card it's easy enough to open the persistent net rules file 
and give the replacement interface the number of the interface it replaced.