Re: How does "alias ethX drivername" in modules.conf work?

Andrzej Krzysztofowicz
2001-08-07T05:58:17Z

> >> One of my systems has SIX ethernet cards, these being three ISA
> >> and two PCI NE2000 clones and a DEC Tulip. Here's the relevant
> >> section of modules.conf on the system in question:
>
> >> Q> alias eth0 ne
> >> Q> options eth0 io=0x340
> >> Q> alias eth1 ne
> >> Q> options eth1 io=0x320
> >> Q> alias eth2 ne
> >> Q> options eth2 io=0x2c0
> >> Q> alias eth3 ne2k-pci
> >> Q> alias eth4 ne2k-pci
> >> Q> alias eth5 tulip
>
>
> However, if the cards are controlled by different drivers, you can
> influence the order they are detected in by your choice of entries in
> modules.conf - in the example above, the ISA cards are always eth0,
^^^^^^
> eth1 and eth2, the NE2k-pci cards are always eth3 and eth4, and the
> tulip card is always eth5, simply because that's what the said file
> says.

Not always. You are wrong here, I'm afraid:

Lets assume that eth0-eth3 are not initialized at boot time and your init
scripts attempt to initialize eth4 ...

To avoid such problems one probably should add a lot of pre-install parameters
in modules.conf.

Andrzej