> I bet you it doesn't. What exactly are you willing to bet? > and that's not enough state. It's enough. > If you swap two identical cards between PCIe slot

> I bet you it doesn't. What exactly are you willing to bet? > and that's not enough state. It's enough. > If you swap two identical cards between PCIe slots It's probed by slot so in the case you present no config would generally be needed unless you have something dependant on layer 2 in the setup. > If you pull em1 and add a new card in its place does it come up as em1 (incorrect) Yes it does and actually that is correct. I don't want to have to muck with configs simply because I swapped a nic. If you like doing it that way have at it. > If you have a fixed external network with its own routing rules on a USB ethernet adapter, does it work correctly if you happen to boot with another such device connected? Depends on the setup, you can have it pretty much do anything but by default it would work if you swapped it out with something that used the same driver. > I admit I'm chuckling a little about the idea of udev not being "needed". As someone who has ripped udev out of a distribution and replaced it with something easier(auto provisioning) for a specific large SaaS stack, I can assure you udev is not needed.