biosdevname

biosdevname in its simplest form takes an kernel name as an argument, and returns the BIOS-given name it "should" be. This is necessary on systems where the BIOS name for a given device (e.g. the label on the chassis is "Gb1") doesn't map directly and obviously to the kernel name (e.g. eth0).

The distro-patches/sles10/ directory contains a patch needed to integrate biosdevname into the SLES10 udev ethernet naming rules.

This also works as a straight udev rule. On RHEL4, that looks like:

KERNEL=="eth*", ACTION=="add", PROGRAM="/usr/sbin/biosdevname -i %k", NAME="%c"

This makes use of various BIOS-provided tables:

PCI Confuration Space
PCI IRQ Routing Table ($PIR)
PCMCIA Card Information Structure
SMBIOS 2.6 Type 9, Type 41, and HP OEM-specific types

therefore it's likely that this will only work well on architectures that provide such information in their BIOS.

What's New in This Release:

· Work has been done to integrate biosdevname with udev rules cleanly.
· This release, along with udev > 115, accomplishes that.
· A segfault in the PCMCIA code path and another segfault have been fixed.
· This release is available as a Debian package.
· There are some changes to the makefile and RPM spec file.