Folks, To go along with our high-level proposal on indiana-discuss at opensolaris.org, I'd like to get a discussion started regarding the technical details of how we're going to get this done. Here's a general idea of how I think this might work:
The algorithm for assigning datalink names could be a service property of the datalink-management service. The dlmgmtd daemon could load this property at startup. The dlmgmt_create_common() function currently requires a link name, and dlmgmt_upcall_create() always calls this function with the devname to ensure that the linkname matches the underlying device name. We could change those semantics such that dlmgmtd_create_common() could take a NULL link name. If passed in a NULL link name, it could come up with a link name based on the algorithm specified in the service property loaded above. The naming algorithm property could be set differently by default on Nevada and Indiana, to maintain the device name defaults on Nevada, but the use the net# defaults on Indiana. I'm guessing that the installer could set this property explicitly. One hole in this approach exists when dlmgmtd isn't running and network devices attach (does this happen during reconfigure boot?). What do we do for that case? Perhaps we need to re-think whether links are created at all if devices attach and dlmgmtd isn't running... What do you think about this? -Seb
