On 8/22/2025 7:23 AM, Jakub Kicinski wrote: > On Thu, 21 Aug 2025 21:23:20 -0700 Calvin Owens wrote: >>>> If you actually have data on that, obviously that's different. But it >>>> sounds like you're guessing just like I am. >>> >>> I could only guess about other OS Vendors, one could check it also >>> for Ubuntu in their public git, but I don't think we need more data, as >>> ultimate judge here are Stable Maintainers >> >> Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree, it's udev after all that decides to >> read the thing in /sys and name the interfaces differently because it's >> there... > > Yeah, that's my feeling. Ideally there should be a systemd-networkd > setting that let's user opt out of adding the phys_port_name on > interfaces. 99% of users will not benefit from these, new drivers or > old. We're kinda making everyone suffer for the 1% :(
There already is, see my thread here: From https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/[email protected]/ > If you want to stop including the "np<N>" to the device names, I believe > you can set the ID_NET_NAME_ALLOW_PHYS_PORT_NAME=0 via udev properties. > > From what I can tell searching online, this can be done by setting an > appropriate entry in /etc/udev/hwdb.d/ .. i.e. adding this file: > > /etc/udev/hwdb.d/50-net-naming-disable-phys-port-name.hwdb > net:naming:* > ID_NET_NAME_ALLOW_PHYS_PORT_NAME=0 > > after adding this file, you also need to update the hardware database with > > $ systemd-hwdb update > > From here, you should be able to reboot and the physical port name would > be removed from all devices which have it. > > It appears to work on my test system running Fedora with systemd v256. > > At any rate, this is fully an artifact of how systemd renames things and > I do not believe we should be working around that by modifying our drivers. > I still stand by this, but I can understand the motivations and accept the changes to allow opting out of physical port names for the older devices. > You're unlikely to convince systemd folks to change defaults, but you > might be able to convince some distributions to change their defaults. > Either way, you are best to work around this on your system in whichever > ways you see fit. I don't know why systemd changed the default, but that change has been there for sometime. At least a year or two in Fedora if my memory is accurate. The fact that the default has changed but gone unnoticed because it is only triggered by a kernel update is I think part of the challenge. We can keep applying this workaround to "legacy" devices so that at least those ones don't get changed randomly when we add devlink support... but I think the real problem is ultimately outside of our control in the hands of the systemd and userspace folks who chose to change the persistent naming scheme default. Personally, I agree the extra part of the name is useless for my setups, and I have since configured all my systems to exclude it.
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