Lately I've been doing a bunch of things with a real installed Fedora 15 machine (previous experimentation has mostly been with a Live USB stick used temporarily on various machines). One result of this is that I've actually noticed the name that Fedora 15 chose to give my ethernet as a result of its switch to consistent network device naming.

As it happens, my Fedora machine's Ethernet is now called p5p1. There are at least two problems with this name.

The first one is that it's wrong. Since this is an onboard Ethernet port, it should have an emN name (either em0 or em1 depending on which bit of documentation I read). It doesn't get the right name because biosdevname trusts the BIOS's information about what things are and aren't onboard devices. Yes, really, despite plenty of experience that trusting PC BIOSes for anything (or at least anything not required to boot Windows) mostly serves as a source of comedy gold (as long as you're at a safe distance).

The second problem is that this is a terrible name. Practically its sole virtue is that it's unique. It's not predictable (not without detailed information about the machine's bus topology and a good understanding of PCI), it's not very meaningful, and it's certainly not memorable. It's the kind of name that can only be sensibly used by programs that get it directly from the system's configuration in one way or another.

(There are a number of problems with slot based names, but one of them is that another machine with a different motherboard (but also onboard Ethernet) might well have a completely different name because its Ethernet controller is hooked up to the PCI(E) bus in a different 'slot' and a machine with a real network card (and no onboard network) will have yet another name.)

What this means is that while the idea of consistent network device naming may in theory be good, the tools for achieving it are not yet mature. Right now it certainly looks as if biosdevname is terminally naive and will frequently give wrong answers (I would guess that it gets things wrong more often than it gets them right).

(As it happens I think that there is enough information present in the output of biosdecode to deduce that the machine's Ethernet must be an onboard device, so it's clear that biosdevname should be able to do better. Possibly it needs to be taught about all of the common ways that BIOS creators get this information wrong and given heuristics for figuring out what the real situation is likely to be.)