On Thu, 20 Jul 2000, Allen K. Smith wrote: > Why are these drivers enforcing policy like this? Policy is for me, the > sysadmin, not the driver. The kernel is presenting network interfaces using a uniform API. The name to refer to an interface usually looks like eth%d, and the names are issued in sequence using a well-defined, fixed, order. That is a mechanism. If you want a feature such as "the interface associated with PCI bus 0 device 5 is named 'susan'", you can write a user-level program 'my-ifconfig' to lookup the name and map it to the kernel's name. The would be policy. You *do not* need kernel support to do this. You probably could prototype it with a shell script in ten minutes. More likely ten hours to work out the semantics and eight minutes of coding. > BIOS manufacturers have realised this by > allowing me to choose boot device order, which video card is primary, > etc. It would be nice if linux drivers provided at least this kind of > basic policy control to the sysadmin. Bahhh. The BIOS doesn't let me say "I want to boot from the disk with serial number 01A4434E", or "the video card in slot 3 is the boot screen". > > Patch below does reordering. Unfortunately, eepro100 driver uses chip-type > > based ordering and not slot based, so if on-board chip type differs from This is because you are looking at an old driver that was improperly modified. That old driver originally only looked for the i82557, and whoever changed itto recognized the new chips didn't understand the issues. The current driver is at http://www.scyld.com/network/eepro100.html and uses 'pci-scan'. Donald Becker becker@scyld.com Scyld Computing Corporation http://www.scyld.com 410 Severn Ave. Suite 210 Beowulf Clusters / Linux Installations Annapolis MD 21403 - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
