[OpenIndiana-discuss] Intel 82579V ethernet not recognized

[James Carlson]

Open Indiana wrote:
> So, now i finally understand how it works with the NIC naming ;-)

Driver naming follows a number of different rules, but is generally up
to the author of the code.

For network drivers, the driver name cannot end in a digit, because if
it did, the normal IP interface naming scheme would fall apart.  That's
why the driver that was called "e1000" on Linux is called "e1000g" on
OpenIndiana.

That "e1000g" driver was a ground-breaker in another area: previously,
no network driver had ever had digits in the middle; only letters.
Guess how much software broke because it thought the driver name was
just "e" and that it was the 1001st instance in the system?

Traditionally, driver names were all lower case characters, and were
limited to just two or three characters intentionally.  So, old Solaris
SPARC systems have "le" for "Lance Ethernet" (with "Lance" being a name
for the chipset supported).  The reason to have short names is to help
support the old BSD ioctl interfaces, which are limited to 16 character
names.  (Yes, there are also newer interfaces that support much more.)

Another factor in naming is what "everyone else does."  If a driver has
a well-known name because it's used on Linux or BSD or some other
system, then that's usually a good choice so that people don't get too
confused.

-- 
James Carlson         42.703N 71.076W         <carlsonj at workingcode.com>