biosdevname Copyright (c) 2006, 2007 Dell, Inc. <Matt_Domsch@dell.com> Licensed under the GNU General Public License, Version 2. biosdevname in its simplest form takes a kernel device name as an argument, and returns the BIOS-given name it "should" be. This is necessary on systems where the BIOS name for a given device (e.g. the label on the chassis is "Gb1") doesn't map directly and obviously to the kernel name (e.g. eth0). The distro-patches/sles10/ directory contains a patch needed to integrate biosdevname into the SLES10 udev ethernet naming rules. This also works as a straight udev rule. On RHEL4, that looks like: KERNEL=="eth*", ACTION=="add", PROGRAM="/sbin/biosdevname -i %k", NAME="%c" This makes use of various BIOS-provided tables: PCI Confuration Space PCI IRQ Routing Table ($PIR) PCMCIA Card Information Structure SMBIOS 2.6 Type 9, Type 41, and HP OEM-specific types therefore it's likely that this will only work well on architectures that provide such information in their BIOS.