Proposal: enable stateless persistant network interface names

[D. Jared Dominguez]

>Maybe biosdevname would be nice to have, but:
>- somebody needs to actually maintain it in Debian

I actually had it ready to upload, but then given the approach RHEL 7 
took and the general trend towards systemd-based approaches, I held off. 
If there is interest, though, I'm happy to maintain biosdevname for 
Debian (and also work on the same team as the biosdevname maintainer).

>- by default it only works on Dell systems

That's not entirely true. It's more the case that we make sure our BIOS 
people don't mess things up so that biosdevname stops working correctly 
on our hardware. Having consistent interface naming is important for us. 
(We also have started caring about consistent enumeration for storage.) 
The end result is the same, though.

>- it does not seem to me to provide any benefit over the firmware-based
>  names since in practice both would use by default an interface index
>  in the common case

Firmware based in what sense? From the biosdevname readme, biosdevname 
uses:
PCI Configuration Space
PCI IRQ Routing Table ($PIR)
PCMCIA Card Information Structure
SMBIOS 2.6 Type 9, Type 41, and HP OEM-specific types

--Jared


-- 
Jared Domínguez
Infrastructure Software Engineering
Dell | Enterprise Solutions Group