Andrey Borzenkov said the following on 06/19/2013 02:22 AM:
Linux is not the only operating system where device names changed from release to release.
Indeed! I've had a 12.2 and 12.3 installed on similar hardware (the 800Mhz pieces of crap out of the Closet of Anxieties that I speak of) One got eth0 the other eth1 - same hardware, same family of motherboard and embedded system. But more to the point: what's magic about "ertyhX' rather than a descriptive name? If you are running NetworkManager rather than the command line then details are hidden from you. If you are running from the command line you can do what I'm doing to cope with the fact that what is eth0 - the single ethernet port - on one machine is eth1 on the other. Heck, even if you are scripting its easy enough to run grep/sed/awk to pull it out of a query. If you are debugging, the the names are more useful than a mere "eth0". There is also the POV that these descriptive device names are really no different from the use of UUID for disk names. They stay the same across releases, even across changes in the distribution. Look at this way. Suppose I have three partitions. I then use fdisk to split one of them into two partitions. What happens to the names of the other two? +---------------------+---------------------+----------------------+ | a | b | c | +---------------------+---------------------+----------------------+ becomes +---------+-----------+---------------------+----------------------+ | | | b | c | +---------+-----------+---------------------+----------------------+ or +---------------------+---------+-----------+----------------------+ | a | | | c | +---------------------+---------+-----------+----------------------+ Oh, and try that with different distributions not just different releases! If you use UUID the names stay the same; if you use 'partition-based' the /dev/sda2 and /dev/sda3 might (or might not depending on things you may be unaware of) change. This is one reason I use LVM! Even if I move a LV to another physical drive it keeps the same name :-) I can - and have - taken such drives from one machine to another, booted them under other distributions and the persistent naming if partitions based on UUID and LVM naming meant that I had no hassle. Now you may live in an idealised world where your hardware never fails, you never upgrade. Maybe you aren't one of the people who are unhappy with the way Suse is going and want to move to Fedora, Mageia or CentOS. If you use UUID for your partition naming in /etc/fstab then life will be much nice because you are using persistent naming. But you really can't tell what those other distributions will do with your other devices names. Or the partitions that don't use UUID or LVM. -- "No, no. No crime," said Sherlock Holmes, laughing. "Only one of those whimsical little incidents which will happen when you have four million human beings all jostling each other within the space of a few square miles. Amid the action and reaction of so dense a swarm of humanity, every possible combination of events may be expected to take place, and many a little problem will be presented which may be striking and bizarre without being criminal. We have already had experience of such." -- From "The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle" -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org