Consistent Network Device Naming - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Consistent Network Device Naming is a standard for naming ethernet

Ethernet

Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....

adapters in Linux

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

created to replace the old standard ethX which caused problems on multihomed

Multihoming

Multihoming is a technique used to increase the reliability of the Internet connection for an IP network. As an adjective, it is typically used to describe a customer, rather than an Internet service provider network...

machines whereby the network adapters would get renamed based on which was polled first during bootup.

The new naming scheme is as follows:

em[1-N] for on-board (embedded) NICs (# matches chassis labels)
pci# for cards in PCI slots, port 1..N
NPAR & SR-IOV devices add a suffix of _, from 0..N depending on the number of Partitions or Virtual Functions exposed on each port.
Other Linux conventions, such as . and : suffixes remain unchanged and are still applicable

Among the first major Linux distribution

Linux distribution

A Linux distribution is a member of the family of Unix-like operating systems built on top of the Linux kernel. Such distributions are operating systems including a large collection of software applications such as word processors, spreadsheets, media players, and database applications...

s to adopt the standard, there are Fedora 15 and Red Hat RHEL 6.1
.

Further reading