On Wed, Dec 08, 2010 at 01:10:05PM +0000, Andrew Lyon wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 2:10 PM, Matt Domsch <[email protected]> wrote:
> > FYI, I know people are interested in the progress of this feature.
> > -Matt
> >
> > ----- Forwarded message from Matt Domsch <[email protected]> -----
> >
> > Date: ? Mon, 6 Dec 2010 08:06:50 -0600
> > From: Matt Domsch <[email protected]>
> > To: [email protected], [email protected],
> > ? ? ? ?"K, Narendra" <[email protected]>,
> > ? ? ? ?"Hargrave, Jordan" <[email protected]>,
> > ? ? ? ?"Rose, Charles" <[email protected]>,
> > ? ? ? ?Colin Watson <[email protected]>
> > Subject: biosdevname v0.3.2
> >
> > Bugfix update to biosdevname, now version 0.3.2.
> >
> > The legacy code for reading the PCI IRQ Routing Table ($PIR) and the
> > PCMCIA information has been removed. ?This means biosdevname will only
> > report BIOS-provided names if your system has SMBIOS 2.6 or higher and
> > has the information in Type 9 or Type 41. ?This is in preparation for
> > widespread use, and will keep biosdevname from suggesting names on
> > systems that are well into or beyond their useful lifetime and
> > introducing an unexpected change of behavior on them. ?Dell PowerEdge
> > 10G and newer, HP ProLiant G6 and newer are known to have SMBIOS 2.6,
> > as do a number of desktop, laptop, and netbook-class systems as
> > reported on the fedora-devel mailing list.
> >
> 
> Completely removing this functionality seems like a real backwards
> step to me, I have run into problems on Poweredge 2950 and r200
> servers with network cards being renamed after reboot due to udev rule
> changes and I was planning to use biosdevname to add (optional)
> persistent device naming to Gentoo udev, testing biosdevname (rev
> c7241427ad91b6f27c7a9bd798c3152b35e1da8c) on these servers it
> consistently returns the correct name for both onboard and pci network
> cards so the functionality does work well for older servers.

Can you verify for me that you're running the lastest BIOS for these
please?  I expected PE2950 BIOS 2.6.1 has SMBIOS 2.6, but I don't have
one handy to test with.

The other concern I hadn't noted was that the tool must run as root in
order to read the $PIR table.  Now, as a udev helper, where udev is
running as root, that seems OK, but some kernel developers have
requested biosdevname not require running as root if possible.  $PIR
is not available without running as root, as it's not exposed in sysfs
or other method, and waiting until it _is_ available would take
development + another 6 months.

I can consider putting the code back, but if the systems of concern
have new-enough BIOS, that'd be my preference.

Thanks,
Matt

-- 
Matt Domsch
Technology Strategist
Dell | Office of the CTO

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