interface renaming

[Matthew Dillon]

    I think for DragonFly we should leave the naming as it is.  For all intents
    and purposes ethernet interfaces are 'hidden' and 'abstracted' from the
    user be virtue of the route table already, we don't need to abstract them
    further by naming them all the same!  That is, users use IP addresses,
    not interface names.  Only sysops use interface names and, personally
    speaking, I have never once in my entire life gotten confused.

    Our RC system already abstracts interfaces fairly well.  We could abstract
    it even more and simply have an RC variable for the 'primary' (unnamed)
    interface which is used for the first non-localhost interface if a
    specifically-named interface has not been specified.  It would be like
    a 2 line adjustment.

    I don't mind giving ifconfig the ability to 'name' an interface for the
    purposes of IPFW, IPFILTER, and systat and friends, but I would like
    to keep the 'base interface name' intact as it currently stands and I
    certainly do not think it's worth making any significant kernel mods 
    (other then adding a settable string field for the net-if).  It sounds
    like a 95% userland solution.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

:On Fri, Oct 31, 2003 at 09:19:02PM +0100, Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai wrote:
:> -On [20031031 21:12], Brooks Davis (brooks at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote:
:> >In FreeBSD I'll probably implement an tunable to make that possiable,
:> >but it definatly won't be the default.
:>=20
:> Glad to hear that.
:>=20
:> I mean, from a certain perspective I can understand that you don't know
:> to know whether or not a particular interface is an Intel card or a 3Com
:> card and both should just be named ethN, for example.  But it always
:> made sense in my mind, at least, to differentiate on the interface name
:> level between the different vendors to know which card you are messing
:> with.
:
:I agree.  When I was talking to Warner Losh at BSDCon we pretty much
:agreed that when you don't want to care which brand of interface is in a
:slot, devd was going to be the answer.  You'd tell devd to run a script
:on any ethernet card on bus X in slot Y to name it what ever you wanted.
:The rest of your configuration could forget that it was a Foo Corp.
:10/100T card and just call it "uplink" or what ever.
:
:-- Brooks