On which principles FreeBSD giving the NICs ports identity?

[Sergei_Shablovsky]

Hi, all FreeBSD Gurus!

Could You be so please to explain:
On which principles FreeBSD giving the NICs ports identity?

From my knowledge, there are involved (from HIGHT IMPACT to LOW):
motherboard schematics,
BIOS subsystem,
NICs mechanical interface (PCI, PCI-e, etc...),
NICs order in motherboard slots,
FreeBSD drivers,
...
?

Thank You for help and opinions!

 

[shkhln]

Enumeration order. It's not supposed to be stable with regard to the hardware changes.

 

[Sergei_Shablovsky]

Enumeration order. It's not supposed to be stable with regard to the hardware changes.

I know that. I asking for details...

 

[shkhln]

There is nothing more to it. If you want to (relatively) reliably identify individual ports, you can use MAC addresses for that.

 

[Phishfry]

Two options come to mind.

Manually set interface names in /boot/device.hints

hint.igb.0.at="pci0:6:0:3"
hint.igb.1.at="pci0:6:0:2"
hint.igb.2.at="pci0:6:0:1"
hint.igb.3.at="pci0:6:0:0"
hint.igb.4.at="pci0:9:0:0"

Drawback here is any PCIe card install/removal could change pci bus address of your interfaces and need fixup.

Then Eric A. Borisch's port.
sysutils/ethname