Re: Two 3COM Etherlink III netcards in one box

Paul Gortmaker (paul@rasty.anu.edu.au)
Sun, 29 Dec 1996 15:04:43 +1000 (EST)


> it's been converted to a number. A lot of the ethercard modules don't
> support multiple instantiation yet. I don't know offhand if 3c509 does.
>
> phil
>

With v2.0, the answer is no. If you look at patch 2.1.14, somebody added
multiple card per single insmod support based upon cloning what I did for
the NE2000 driver (the comment in 3c509.c is a dead give-away ;-)

#define MAX_3C_CARDS 4 /* Max number of NE cards per module */

Hehe. Anyway, I'd just grab a 2.1.x (x>13) driver and drop it into v2.0
if you want multiple 3c509 cards used with modules. I believe there still
may be an unresolved issue with respect to supplying i/o addresses and
the way in which the cards respond to the ID port during the probe.
This may mainest itself as things not getting detected when you supply
"io=0xNNN,0xMMM" but working fine when you do "io=0xMMM,0xNNN" so do
watch out for that. IMHO it is just easier to compile the driver into
the kernel and boot with "ether=0,0,eth1". Then the above problem becomes
a non-issue.

Paul.