> Even this feels too extreme for me. I think users would hate it. They > did an ifup and swapped cables. They expect the OS/Driver/Firmware > to continue trying to honor their ifup request.
Lets take a look around at other subsystems.... What happens if you hot-unplug a SATA drive? An MMC card? A USB device? A PCIe card? A CPU? An SDRAM? Do you know of any subsystem that tried to keep its configuration across a hot unplug/plug event? I suspect they all require user space to take some action to get the newly plugged hardware into operation. Andrew