there's a rule in /etc/udev/rules.d/75-persistant-net-generator.rules which stops udev from renaming "Xen virtual interfaces". should there be one to stop it from renaming others, such as the "virbr0" that was generated when i made a VM in virt-manager? i _suspect_ that this, combined with sky2 net driver weirdness and multiple network cards, has ended up with very broken networking after upgrade to F8. can't prove it though! i've got the sky2 device with a zero mac address. i think that's confusing things.
Can you show me the rules from /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules which is bothering you?
in 75-persistent-net-generator.rules (not 70-...) there's lines like this: # device name whitelist KERNEL!="eth*|ath*|wlan*[0-9]|ra*|sta*|ctc*|lcs*|hsi*", GOTO="persistent_net_generator_end" # ignore Xen virtual interfaces SUBSYSTEMS=="xen", GOTO="persistent_net_generator_end" and i'm wondering why "virbr*" isn't in either of those rules or another like them. however: a) i don't really understand that file so i'm kind of guessing and b) i saw this when i was trying to track down my network problems and i'd seen these two lines in dmesg: virbr0: Dropping NETIF_F_UFO since no NETIF_F_HW_CSUM feature. net virbr0_rename: device_rename: sysfs_create_symlink failed (-17) but adding "virbr*" to the whitelist line didn't get rid of those messages so i guess they're not connected anyway. i probably raised this as 'medium' rather than 'low' because i was so frustrated with the network mess. sorry about that. blimey, i can tell i was tired and annoyed when i raised this. looking at the file again i see i missed the "!" in the "KERNEL!=..." line and also missed that the "xen" line is talking about "SUBSYSTEMS". :-)
75-persistent-net-generator.rules only generates rules for you the first time, it sees an interface. You can always put your own rules in 70-persistent-net.rules, which is taken into account _before_ even 75-persistent-net-generator.rules is executed.
oh, and 75-persistent-net-generator.rules would only prevent an automatic line in 70-persistent-net.rules, but not renaming in general.
ok. many thanks for that info - that's very useful. (like, i can actually see what's going on in that 70-... file!)