A datalink represents an object in the second layer (L2) of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model. Datalinks can represent many different L2 entities, such as physical network devices (physical links), aggregations of physical datalinks, virtual network interface cards (VNICs), and so on.
When you add network devices to a system, corresponding physical links are automatically created to which are assigned generic names such as net0, net1, and so on.
The following table illustrates the correspondence between the hardware (NIC), the device instance, the link name, and the interface that is configured over the link. The names of the datalinks are automatically provided by the OS.
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As indicated in this table, while the device instance name remains hardware-based, the datalinks are renamed by the OS after the installation.
The dladm show-phys command shows the mapping between datalink names and their corresponding device instances:
$ dladm show-phys LINK MEDIA STATE SPEED DUPLEX DEVICE net2 Ethernet up 1000 full bge2 net0 Ethernet up 1000 full e1000g0 net3 Ethernet up 1000 full nge3 net1 Ethernet up 1000 full e1000g1