> On Nov 19, 2023, at 10:34 PM, Mina Galić <free...@igalic.co> wrote:
>
>
>
>>> FreeBSD currently does not preserve the old ( original ) name of
>>> interfaces if it is renamed ( either physical or cloned ones ).
>>> While there's an attempt https://reviews.freebsd.org/D28247
>>> to get the device name (physical
>>> ones) but it is not perfect and not completed.
>>>
>>> So may I ask why you need to know if a network interface was renamed ?
>>
>>
>> Just last week I found this quite a pain as well; once an interface has
>> been renamed, if it's not a pseudo-interface with an obvious group
>> there's no clear way, AFAICT, to determine which driver created it
>
> I think the main reason that we need to know if and from what an interface
> has been renamed is if we need to know what driver we're working with.
>
> But given that a rename doesn't change — or even just *alias*
> the sysctl dev hierarchy, where a %driver is recorded, we can't
> track it back.
>
> (but again, that's just for physical devices, then again virtual devices
> record what type of device they are in their group which
> is essentially the same thing)
Since it is just for physical devices, may I propose to have the driver name in
their groups ?
So an if_ure interface ue0 will look like:
```
ue0: flags=1008843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST,LOWER_UP> metric 0
mtu 1500
options=60009b<RXCSUM,TXCSUM,VLAN_MTU,VLAN_HWTAGGING,VLAN_HWCSUM,RXCSUM_IPV6,TXCSUM_IPV6>
ether 00:e0:4c:xx:xx:xx
media: Ethernet autoselect (1000baseT <full-duplex>)
status: active
+++ groups: ure
nd6 options=23<PERFORMNUD,ACCEPT_RTADV,AUTO_LINKLOCAL>
```
That does not include the unit number. But could be useful to quickly get the
driver name of physical devices.
>
> As soon as we have more than one interface with different drivers
> it's impossible to parse out what we're dealing with without
> parsing rc.conf, logs, or worse things I can't think of right now.
>
>
>
>
>
