Proposal: enable stateless persistant network interface names

[Martin Pitt]

Hey Marco,

Marco d'Itri [2015-05-11  5:53 +0200]:
> I am not sure that we really need to retire 75-persistent-net-generator 
> right now: the annoying part to maintain is the kernel patch which we 
> will need anyway for at least a couple of releases

Which kernel patch? I think all of this ought to work on a vanilla
kernel.

> It is trivial to make it opt-in by setting something like
> net.ifnames=0 (or even a different and specific value), and we can
> revisit this decision when we will be closer to the release.

Yes, that will be the case once we drop the Debian specific
Make-net.ifnames-opt-in-instead-of-opt-out.patch .

> Actually it requires us to keep maintaining the
> Revert-udev-network-device-renaming patch as long as there will be
> systems with a 70-persistent-net.rules file renaming eth* to eth*.

Argh, that's true. I. e. another decade or so :/

> Maybe biosdevname would be nice to have, but:
> [...]
> So I do not think that we need to care about it.

Full ack. ifnames does everything biosdevname does and is both more
universal and also more flexible to configure, so there is absolutely
zero reason to introduce biosdevname now. It's mostly a backwards
compatibility problem for systems which already have it installed (i.
e. not pure Debian).

> An obvious downside is longer names for devices which do not provide 
> ID_NET_NAME_ONBOARD: e.g. the WiFi card in my Dell laptop does 
> not (wlp2s0), but the Ethernet port does (eno1).
> It will be even worse when not even ID_NET_NAME_PATH is defined (e.g. on 
> my Allwinner-based ARM computer), which means that interfaces will get 
> a mac-based name like enx028909xxxxxx.

Remember, MAC based names aren't used with the default policy, you
have to opt-in. Although it might happen that we do configure this by
default for USB devices in the Debian policy, see the other parts of
the thread.

Thanks!

Martin
-- 
Martin Pitt                        | http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com)  | Debian Developer  (www.debian.org)
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