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VMWare network devices and udev

Posted on September 16, 2007

I’ve been struggling for a while trying to get udev to maintain device names for vmxnet devices when running in a virtual machine. Well, I finally figured it out. The 75-persistent-net-generator.rules script in Gentoo was making rules that looked like:

SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTRS{address}=="00:0c:29:0b:02:d2", NAME="eth0"

These seemed to be silently ignored.

After an emerge --sync; emerge -u world last night, the vmware devices started getting IDs following the highest-numbered eth device. These rules would be added to 70-persistent-net.rules, and on the next boot the devices would move up even higher, causing all network device config settings to be ignored.

I noticed that the new rules added to 70-persistent-net.rules were of the form:

SUBSYSTEM=="net", DRIVERS=="?*", ATTR{address}=="00:0c:29:0b:02:d2", NAME="eth0"

(ATTRS was replaced with ATTR), which just means the match is done on the specific node rather than checking all of the parents.

After a lot of painful attempts to fix this, I finally found the problem. Apparently the DRIVERS key is unset at this point for the vmxnet driver. I removed that test, so that I have:

SUBSYSTEM=="net", ATTR{address}=="00:0c:29:0b:02:d2", NAME="eth0"

which now works.

Phew!

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