Description of problem:
There seems to be a subtle timing issue in ifup-eth which indeterministically causes some qeth based s390 network devices to not come up on boot. Apparently, LCS, CTC, and NETIUCV don't seem to have this problem.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
initscripts-8.95-1.s390x

How reproducible:
Configure a set of qeth network devices, chkconfig network on, chkconfig NetworkManager off, reboot several times and see some of the devices sometimes fail to come up on boot.

Actual results:
Example console output of a bad case:

Bringing up loopback interface:  [  OK  ]   
Bringing up interface ctc0:  [  OK  ]   
Bringing up interface eth0:  Device eth0 does not seem to be present, delaying i
nitialization.  
[FAILED]   
Bringing up interface eth1:  [  OK  ]   
Bringing up interface eth2:  [  OK  ]   
Bringing up interface eth3:  [  OK  ]   
Bringing up interface hsi0:  Device hsi0 does not seem to be present, delaying 
nitialization.  
[FAILED]   
Bringing up interface hsi1:  [  OK  ]   
Bringing up interface hsi2:  [  OK  ]   
Bringing up interface hsi3:  [  OK  ]   
Bringing up interface hsi4:  [  OK  ]   
Bringing up interface iucv0:  [  OK  ]   

Expected results:
All devices with ONBOOT=yes should come up automatically without any problems.

Additional info:
During the rewrite of linuxrc.s390, I figured that qeth based devices sometimes need a very little amount of time between being set online and the in-kernel device appearing. Seems a similar issue here, because the errors happen in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup-eth where it checks with "ip link" for the network device:

# now check the real state
is_available ${REALDEVICE} || {
      if [ -n "$alias" ]; then
         echo $"$alias device ${DEVICE} does not seem to be present, delaying in
itialization."
      else
         echo $"Device ${DEVICE} does not seem to be present, delaying initializ
ation."
      fi
      exit 1
}

My current hack is a "udevadm trigger" in rc.local, which I guess triggers network hotplugging and thus brings up all devices finally using the network service. However, this is not a solution.

Since this works perfectly with RHEL 5, I did a diff of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/* between RHEL 5.2 and F11 but couldn't find any significant difference.

Can we introduce a sleep 1 for qeth network devices somewhere?
What do the others think?