PCI slot based device names are not necessarily stable
One of the ways that Linux tries to get stable device names these
days is to base them on information about the PCI bus and slot that
a particular device is located at. This naming is behind, for
example, hardware-based Ethernet names
(see also)
and /dev/disk/by-path/ for SATA and SAS drives. The theory is that since the name describes
the PCI(E) location, as long as you don't physically relocate the
card the name will stay the same. This is especially useful for
things on the motherboard (because you can't move them at all).
The only problem is that this is not necessarily the case. There
exists PC hardware where adding, changing, or removing other
hardware will change the PCI bus and slot information for your
hardware without you touching it at all; this even includes hardware
located on the motherboard. Really. And the shifts aren't necessarily
small, either. In the case I ran into today, changing from a dual
port to a single port PCIE Gigabit card and moving it one card slot
to the left changed two SAS disk controllers from PCI 07:00.0 and
08:00.0 to 04:00.0 and 05:00.0. Of course this totally changed how
their disks came up in /dev/disk/by-path.
(For more fun, the new single-port Ethernet became 07:00.0 when the old two ports had been 05:00.0 and 06:00.0.)
The resulting reality is that your PCI based names are only stable if you change no hardware in the system. The moment you change any hardware all bets are off for all hardware. You may get lucky and have some devices keep their current PCI names but you may well not. And I don't think you're necessarily protected against perverse things like two equivalent devices swapping names (or at least one of them winding up with what was the other's old name).
If I'm reading lspci output correctly, what is really going on is that
an increasing number of things are behind PCI bridges. These things
create additional PCI buses (the first two digits in the PCI device
numbering), and some combination of Linux, the system BIOS, and the PCI
specification doesn't have a stable assignment for these additional
busses. In fact since PCI(E) cards can themselves include additional
bridges, a fully stable assignment would be very hard. This is part of
what happened in my case; the old dual-port PCIE gigabit card contained
not just two Ethernet controllers but two bridges as well (one for each
controller) and these forcibly perturbed the numbering of other PCI
'busses' (which were really individual cards behind their own bridges).
PS: This has probably been the case for some time and this is just the first occasion I've run into it. We normally configure machines identically; it just so happened this time around that the first hardware unit we got in was used in part to test the dual-port card while the final unit configuration only needs a single-port card.
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