Conversation

hm I thought there was a blog or rant or kernel documentation page about persistent device naming, similar to stable kernel abi nonsense from @gregkh but I can't find it, was I dreaming?

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/process/stable-api-nonsense.rst

1
0
0

@sima @gregkh
I remember a mailing post by Greg which pointed at systems where PCI slot numbers or similar would vary randomly between different boots.

1
0
0
@sourcejedi @sima Yeah, no blog posts, just loads of lkml emails over the years, sorry.

That machine that randomly reassigned PCI ids at boot time is no longer with me, but it was great for testing. I'm sure you can do the same with virtual machines these days, passing in different virtual pci devices to them.

Persistent naming is for userspace to handle, the kernel just uses "grab the next free number" as it's naming "policy" as that's all it can really do.
1
0
2
@gregkh @sima @sourcejedi Was the ordering stable though?
Although I guess with PCIe being somewhat hotplug it would still not be reliable.
0
0
0