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Date: Thu, 2 Aug 2001 10:06:05 -0700
From: Greg KH <greg@kroah.com>
To: Borsenkow Andrej <Andrej.Borsenkow@mow.siemens.ru>,
        linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Persistent device numbers
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In-Reply-To: <200108021020.f72AKZC17605@ns.caldera.de>; from hch@ns.caldera.de on Thu, Aug 02, 2001 at 12:20:35PM +0200
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On Thu, Aug 02, 2001 at 12:20:35PM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> > Most commercial systems (O.K. those I looked into) have some sort of logical
> > device numbering that assigns fixed name based on some unique hardware
> > address (cf /etc/path_to_inst in Solaris). Hardware address usually is a
> > path needed to access device - i.e. Bus/Slot/Channel[/drive id], so that you
> > can set
> >
> > PCI0/Slot3/Channel1 == eth3
> >
> > and this never changes if you add or remove any card.
> >
> > Do I miss something and Linux has such mechanism?
> 
> For some device-types this is provided be userspace tools.  E.g. LVM
> provides persistan names for it's deice by stroing name and UUID on disk,
> 'normal' filesystems can be mounted by UUID or label and Andi Kleen has
> a tool that allows naming network interfaces by MAC addresses.

Yes, and combine the 'nameif' program with the linux-hotplug scripts and
you can have your network devices always be named correctly
automatically when the interface starts up.

greg k-h