Comment 4 for bug 1347859

On Mon, 13 Apr 2015 13:32:15 -0000, Robie Basak wrote:

>A release
>upgrade should not cause biosdevname to get installed. So can you (or
>someone) please confirm that this is definitely the behaviour in some
>case,

It has now been most of a year since I filed the bug report, so as you might
imagine, I no longer remember the details of the upgrade that prompted it.
Here's what I know:

On the system in question, eth0 disappeared and was replaced by
p<something>p<something>.

The main.log files under /var/log/dist-upgrade include lsb-release: quantal,
raring, and saucy. The currently-installed release is trusty. This implies
that the steps to reproduce include one or more of those distribution
upgrades. I guess precise must have been the first-installed release.

Although I don't know when biosdevname was first installed, it is listed in
the Upgrade: log entries of all the /var/log/dist-upgrade/<date>/main.log
files, including one from a year before my bug report. I suppose that means
biosdevname was likely installed by some earlier release, rather than being
newly installed during the problematic dist-upgrade.

The motherboard's chipset is an Intel Z77 Express. The ethernet device uses
a Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 series chip. The r8169 kernel driver is
currently in use.

>and if so provide steps to reproduce so that we can understand the
>mechanism involved here that is making this happen?

Sorry, but I already spent too much time on this issue when it bit me in the
first place. Reproducing it to determine step-by-step instructions would
require taking the computer out of service, saving all of its data and
state, taking it through several install and upgrade cycles, and then
restoring everything. That is far more disruption and time than I can
spare.

>Second, you say that some distributions require both systemd and
>biosdevname interface renaming to be disabled. My understanding is that
>on Ubuntu with systemd (so Vivid only), we do not rename interfaces via
>systemd by default - this must be done explicitly. Can we assume for the
>rest of the discussion that this is true, or otherwise can you provide
>steps to reproduce that demonstrate that it is not (again, another bug
>might be a good idea to avoid cluttering this one)?

That's quite possible. It has been most of a year since I wrote that text,
but I probably meant to include non-ubuntu distros when I wrote "some
distributions".