[tulip-bug] ether= option on the kernel command line

[Andrew Morton]

Florian Wunderlich wrote:
> 
> Thanks for your quick reply.
> 
> I assumed that the driver in the 2.4 kernels is the same as your tulip
> driver, because you are saying on
> http://www.scyld.com/network/tulip.html that "It has been integrated
> with the kernel source tree since 1.1.90". Obviously the tulip driver in
> 2.4.7 (what I am using) at least is not yours. You might want to change
> your page.
> 

In kernel 2.4.2 (or thereabouts) the netdevice initialisation
API was changed to fix a rather nasty race - init_etherdev()
was replaced by alloc_etherdev().  Problem was, this broke
`ether='.  At present, and driver which uses alloc_etherdev()
does not support `ether='.

It took a surprising amount of time for this breakage to be
noticed - I'll be looking to fix it in the 2.4.9-pre series.