Re: network interface *name* alias support?

[Jon Masters <jonathan@jonmasters.org>]

On Sat, 2008-05-24 at 00:54 +0200, Thomas Graf wrote:
> * Jon Masters <jonathan@jonmasters.org> 2008-05-23 15:06
> > My intention is to also allow for:
> > 
> > ifcfg-slot_<whatever>
> > 
> > Where the configuration is based entirely upon what vendor <XYZ> says is
> > the first, second, or third card. Then, those who want to use the older
> > names can continue to do so, but those who prefer to base their
> > configuration upon the order the vendor states, can do so.
> 
> I'd propose to extend the netlink configuration interface, f.e. introduce a
> new netlink attribtue IFLA_SLOT which can be provided to select the device
> to be changed based on the slot number instead of the name/ifindex. That
> would also make it trivial to write a small app using RTM_GETLINK to
> translate a slot number to the corresponding interface name.

I guess that would also work quite nicely for what I want to do, but the
problem is that this will require either:

*). The kernel decodes the DMI extension directly.
*). We can first inform each device which slot it is in (set the slot).

My intention is to implement whatever seems reasonable, and my reason
for asking is that I am not a networking maintainer, so I want to know
what seems reasonable :)

Cheers,

Jon.