On Thu, Feb 08, 2001 at 09:13:14AM -0500, Brian Hechinger wrote:
> Lord Isildur drunkenly mumbled...
> > 
> > This is still Berkeley UNIX here. since the beginning, device names have
> > followed the names of the relevant drivers in the kernel. something
> 
> this is the worst reasoning i have EVER heard.  we've always cross-threaded
> our screws, so we will always cross-thread our screws.  just cause that's how
> it was done it the past doesn't make it right, it makes it how it was done in
> the past.

I couldn't agree more.

Lots of people want to get the layering right WRT things like Ethernet
interfaces, which will ultimately result on stacking an "eth0" or equivalent
on top of the actual physical interface; that will be what you configure
an IP address on.

Needless to say, so one doesn't totally hose people building things like
routers with hot-swap Ethernet cards, all of the usual config goo for
allowing one to hard-wire device names at specific locators will continue
to work for this just as it does for, for example, SCSI disks.

There's actually a big advantage to this.  If, for example, I hard-wire in
my kernel config:

tlp0 at pci1 device 1 function 0
fxp0 at pci1 device 1 function 0

eth0 at tlp0
eth0 at fxp0

If I rip the tlp0 out of my box and drop an fxp0 in the same slot, it's
still named "eth0" to consumers of Ethernet frames.  The application to
things like routers is, I think, pretty obvious.