On Wed, 18 Oct 2000, MONZ wrote: > I have four 3c905 cards in a firewall/router, each its own IRQ and I/O. > BIOS detects tham all and initializes them, ie., with a hub connected, > all display connection ok. It's an Aopen PII/III mobo, don't have its > version. > > Booting Linux, two cards consequently goes dead while network in > started. My first reaction: two of your slots share bus-master pins. The PCI v2 spec tried to eliminate the common v1 configuration problem of bus master cards in slave slots by requiring that all slots support bus masters. Most motherboard chips have only four sets of master pins, so five slot motherboards nominally met the letter of the specs, but not the intent, by sharing bus master signal between two adjacent slots. Either slot can support a bus master card individually, but not both at once. Donald Becker becker@scyld.com Scyld Computing Corporation http://www.scyld.com 410 Severn Ave. Suite 210 Second Generation Beowulf Clusters Annapolis MD 21403 410-990-9993 - : send the line "unsubscribe linux-net" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
