We reported last month that Martin Pitt, a renowned Ubuntu and Debian developer, came with the idea to enable stateless persistent network interface names by default in the next major versions of the Ubuntu and Debian operating systems.

After numerous discussions, Martin Pitt is back with a second proposal for the implementation of stateless persistent network interface names in the Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf), Ubuntu 16.10, Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 (Stretch), and the next Debian releases.

Therefore, Martin Pitt and Michael Biebl came to the conclusion that the best plan was to enable stateless persistent network interface names in the Ubuntu and Debian operating systems in steps. At this point, we recommend reading the initial proposal so you can understand better the situation.

"Some 4 weeks ago I sent a first proposal to change persistent network interface naming away from our current /lib/udev/rules.d/75-persistent-net-generator.rules to udev's 'net.ifnames,'" says Martin Pitt. "Based on the comments and followups (mostly on the Debian ML) I updated the proposal."

Here's how the Ubuntu and Debian developers plan to enable stateless persistent network interface names

As such, the new proposal is that the Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) and Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 (Stretch) operating systems will have ifnames enabled by default for all new installations, the [mac] generator will be dropped, the transition will be mentioned in the release notes, and example rules will be provided to teach users about how to use their custom names.

Then, the Ubuntu 16.10 distribution and the next releases of Debian GNU/Linux after Stretch will be checked for the existence of the /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules in udev.preinst, a critical debconf note will be displayed, and an upgrade will be refused automatically. Also, the hack to retry renames will be dropped to mitigate the race.