Physical network devices are ordered according to media type, where certain types have priority over others. The media types are ordered in descending priority as follows:
Ethernet
InfiniBand devices
Ethernet over IB
WiFi
After devices are grouped and sorted according to media types, these devices are further ordered based on their physical locations, where on-board devices are favored over peripheral devices.
Devices that have higher a priority based on their media type and location are assigned lower instance numbers.
On SPARC based systems, the netN names are assigned to match the netN device aliases that are used in the OpenBoot PROM (OBP). On x86 based systems, SMBIOS data (where available) is used to identify onboard Ethernet devices and assign them to net0, net1, and so on. In addition to (or absent from) these sources of information, devices on a lower motherboard or IO board, host bridge, PCIe root complex, bus, device, and function are ranked ahead of other devices and assigned lower net instances than those on higher motherboards, host bridges, etc.
To display the correspondences between link names, devices, and locations, use the dladm show-phys command with the –L option as follows:
# dladm show-phys -L LINK DEVICE LOCATION net0 e1000g0 MB net1 e1000g1 MB net2 e1000g2 MB net3 e1000g3 MB net4 ibp0 MB/RISER0/PCIE0/PORT1 net5 ibp1 MB/RISER0/PCIE0/PORT2 net6 eoib2 MB/RISER0/PCIE0/PORT1/cloud-nm2gw-2/1A-ETH-2 net7 eoib4 MB/RISER0/PCIE0/PORT2/cloud-nm2gw-2/1A-ETH-2