On Fri, Jun 28, 2019 at 03:55:53PM +0200, Jiri Pirko wrote: > Fri, Jun 28, 2019 at 03:14:01PM CEST, and...@lunn.ch wrote: > > > >What is your user case for having multiple IFLA_ALT_NAME for the same > >IFLA_NAME? > > I don't know about specific usecase for having more. Perhaps Michal > does.
One use case that comes to my mind are the "predictable names" implemented by udev/systemd which can be based on different naming schemes (bus address, BIOS numbering, MAC address etc.) and it's not always obvious which scheme is going to be used. I have even seen multiple times that one schemed was used during system installation and another in the installed system so that network configuration created by installer did not work. For block devices, current practice is not to rename the device and only create multiple symlinks based on different naming schemes (by id, by uuid, by label, etc.). With support for multiple altnames, we could also identify the network device in different ways (all applicable ones). Michal