why was the nloopbacks parameter changed from 8 to 4

why was the nloopbacks parameter changed from 8 to 4

[Kirk Allan]

Is there a technical reason for changing the default nloopbacks parameter in loopback.c in netback from 8 to 4?  I know that this changed quite some time ago and that the default can be overridden when the module loads, but it has now become some what of an inconvenience.  We have many machines that the first four NICs are integrated and do not work so we add a fifth and we have machines which really use more that four NICs.

Any insight is greatly appreciated.
Kirk

Re: why was the nloopbacks parameter changed from 8 to 4

[Keir Fraser]

On 30/1/07 4:10 pm, "Kirk Allan" <kallan@novell.com> wrote:

> Is there a technical reason for changing the default nloopbacks parameter in
> loopback.c in netback from 8 to 4?  I know that this changed quite some time
> ago and that the default can be overridden when the module loads, but it has
> now become some what of an inconvenience.  We have many machines that the
> first four NICs are integrated and do not work so we add a fifth and we have
> machines which really use more that four NICs.

Well, mainly it was that the majority of machines have four or fewer NICs
and that it clutters up the boot output for some distro init scripts if you
have more (e.g., it will print out no-op init info for every interface,
which meant 16 lots of useless output when nloopbacks=8).

I'm inclined to leave it as it is, but I don't have a really strong opinion
on this. Of course it is a trivial thing to patch in the suse kernels...

 -- Keir