README


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biosdevname
Copyright (c) 2006, 2007 Dell, Inc.  <Matt_Domsch@dell.com>
Licensed under the GNU General Public License, Version 2.

biosdevname in its simplest form takes a kernel device 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="/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.