Supriya Ghosh (Editor)

Consistent Network Device Naming

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Consistent Network Device Naming is a convention for naming Ethernet adapters in Linux.

Contents

It was created around 2009 to replace the old ethX naming scheme that caused problems on multihomed machines because the network interface controllers (NICs) would be named based on the order in which they were found by the kernel as it booted. Adding new interfaces could cause the previously added ones to change names. An ECR was submitted to the PCI SIG firmware group on how system firmware can provide device naming to operating systems via the ACPI interface.

Scheme

The new naming scheme is:

  • em[1–N] for on-board (embedded) NICs (# matches chassis labels)
  • p<slot_number>p<port_number> for cards in PCI slots, ports starting at 1 (not zero)
  • NPAR and SR-IOV devices add a suffix of _<vf>, from 0..N depending on the number of Partitions or Virtual Functions exposed on each port
  • Other Linux conventions, such as .<vlan> and :<alias> suffixes remain unchanged and are still applicable

    • Adoption

    The convention was implemented for Dell in a module called biosdevname.

    Among the first major Linux distributions to adopt the module were Fedora 15 in May 2011 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 6.1. It was also released in SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 2 in February 2012. The newer Dell PowerEdge and Dell Precision models support the new names.

    An open-source implementation is available, based on the udev mechanism now present in systemd.

    References

    Consistent Network Device Naming Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA


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