Consistent Network Device Naming
Consistent Network Device Naming is a standard for naming ethernet adapters in Linux created to replace the old standard ethX which caused problems on multihomed machines whereby the network adapters would get renamed based on which was polled first during bootup.
The new naming scheme is as follows:
- em[1-N] for on-board (embedded) NICs (# matches chassis labels)
- pci<slot>#<port> for cards in PCI slots, port 1..N
- NPAR & SR-IOV devices add a suffix of _<vf>, from 0..N depending on the number of Partitions or Virtual Functions exposed on each port.
- Other Linux conventions, such as .<vlan> and :<alias> suffixes remain unchanged and are still applicable [1]
Among the first major Linux distributions to adopt the standard, there are Fedora 15[2] and Red Hat RHEL 6.1 [3].
References
- ^ digitizor.com
- ^ eSecurity Planet Fedora 15 boosts Linux security
- ^ Dell, Narendra K Consistent Network Device Naming in Linux, Dell Linux Engineering division
Further reading