starting Fedora Server SIG

[Rahul Sundaram]

Les Mikesell wrote:
> Jesse Keating wrote:
>> On Wed, 2008-11-19 at 13:24 -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
>>> Agreed, but when the kernel hardware detection order was predictable, 
>>> this was simple.  Now it isn't.
>>
>> When was it predictable?  Even in the 2.4 era, we'd get one chassis
>> barebones from a vender like supermicro and the nic order would be one
>> way, then next month we'd order the same chassis barebones and the nics
>> would be picked up in a different order.  Even more fun is when they'd
>> change with a kernel update, so that the kernel we installed with had
>> one order, and the kernel we updated to and rebooted to had it in a
>> different order.
> 
> I'm pretty sure I cloned Centos 3.x across at least 50 IBM 336's with 
> the NICs always being chosen in the same order. 

That is just being lucky. Even in 2.4 kernel the order wasn't always 
predictable. It changed and there was a post from Linus in LKML about 
considering making it deliberately random to avoid any misconceptions 
that it can always be predictable. It includes details on why it isn't 
as well. I am sure you can find good references.

Rahul