> In the old days, ethernet port names was sequential depending on the order of bringing up the interfaces, and this could vary depending on timing. In the eve

> In the old days, ethernet port names was sequential depending on the order of bringing up the interfaces, and this could vary depending on timing. In the even older days, before the Linux kernel started probing hardware in parallel to speed up the boot process, this wouldn't vary depending on timing; for a given kernel version, the order would always be the same. Of course, the order could change when you updated your kernel, either because it had a new driver which was probed earlier, or because the probing order for the PCI bus changed to the opposite order (IIRC, that actually did happen). And of course, having the network drivers as kernel modules makes it much harder to preserve a deterministic probing order; but back in these days, it was much more common to carefully customize each machine's kernel to have as built-in drivers precisely the set corresponding to the hardware present on a given machine or fleet of machines, carrying that customization over for each new kernel release ("make oldconfig"); kernel modules would be relegated to things like filesystems which you might need only once in a while, and they would be unloaded when no longer in use (memory was precious).