dual Intel PCI Pro100+ cards

[Donald Becker]

On Sat, 13 Mar 1999, Gail Lange wrote:

> Subject: dual Intel PCI Pro100+ cards
>   I have installed 2 Intel PCI Pro100+ cards (Redhat 5.2). I am using
> modules. I had just 1 card in and then installed linux. I rebooted and it
> recognized it as eth0 and in conf.modules it had inserted a line
>         alias eth0 eepro100
> Then I installed a second card. I added in conf.modules a second line
>        alias eth1 eepro100
> I rebooted but eth1 was not recognized. I did ifconfig eth1 and also tried
> to ping another machine on that network.

Drivers for PCI and EISA cards (and, as a special case, the 3c509) should
detect all cards when they are loaded.
Check /proc/pci to verify that both cards exist in the machine.

Note: Since 'kerneld' is something of a hack, the line
  alias eth1 eepro100
doesn't do exactly what you might expect: it doesn't bind a driver to
"eth1", it just loads the eepro100 driver when "eth1" is referenced but
doesn't exist.  Since you have two cards, they are assigned "eth0" and
"eth1".  If you had only one card, referencing "eth1" would cause driver to
load and "eth0" (rather than "eth1") to be detected.

>   My question is - I would like to use modules (eepro100) for the 2 cards.
> However, I read in the RedHat 5.2 installation manual (page 303) that if 2
> ethernet cards use the same driver (as mine do), you must compile a custom
> kernel with the driver built in. Is this actually tru or has anyone found a
> way to avoid this by using modules?

This is incorrect/outdated.
It used to be true for a small number of drivers that someone else did a
sleazy module conversion for.  Those drivers have since been corrected to
handle multiple cards.  (My driver code has always handled multiple cards.)

> (Note: my understanding of trying to give lilo parameters at boot time such as
>     linux ether=0,0,eth0 ether=0,0,eth1
>  does not work for modules. The driver must be built in. Is this also
> correct? I tried this to no effect.)

Correct.

Donald Becker					  becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov
USRA-CESDIS, Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences.
Code 930.5, Goddard Space Flight Center,  Greenbelt, MD.  20771
301-286-0882	     http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/people/becker/whoiam.html