Using biosdevname by default

[John_Hull at Dell.com]

> Secondly, while as I said above I agree that enabling biosdevname

> solves some problems, it seems likely that this change will cause

> problems of its own.  For example, any software that needs to know

> about network interfaces (let's say it listens on a particular

> interface) might well default to eth0; this will break on many

> wireless-only systems and require manual configuration, but if it's

> not the sort of thing that you use on a laptop, many users might

> not previously have noticed.  Using biosdevname by default would

> extend these problems to many server-class machines out of the box.

> While anything like this is certainly a bug already, with the new

> scheme we'd *have* to fix everything like that and it'd be easy to

> miss something.  The question of whether you see this as an

> opportunity to expose existing bugs or as a risk rather depends on

> your point of view. :-)

>



So biosdevname is something that Dell would like to have working in 12.04, regardless of whether it is enabled by default or not or our systems. So we see solving any hard-coded eth names or race conditions as mandatory for 12.04. That said, we're willing to take a crack at identifying (and hopefully solving) the potential problems so that this works correctly. We did this last year already with Fedora, so we should have a good idea where to look. We're also willing to pitch in and help test to verify that this is working as well.



I don't know the specific cutoff date by when the decision needs to be made as to when this would be enabled/disabled by default in the installer, but I would guess upfront testing and bug closure would be needed before a decision to enable would be made.



   John
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