Re: NICs trading places ?

[Andries Brouwer]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2003 at 10:10:37PM +0000, Dave Jones wrote:

> I just upgraded a box with 2 NICs in it to 2.5.66, and found
> that what was eth0 in 2.4 is now eth1, and vice versa.
> Is this phenomenon intentional ? documented ?
> What caused it to do this ?
> 
> The box in question has a DEC Tulip and a 3com 3c905,
> but I imagine this would affect any system with >1 NIC
> of different vendors/drivers ?

Intentional? No.
Documented? I suppose you can find complaints from others
mentioning the same thing.
Cause? eth discovery order is not well-defined.

Once or twice I have submitted patches to rectify.
They help for a while and then someone breaks things again.
I am not quite sure, apologies in case I misremember, but
maybe the most recent breakage was caused by Marc Zyngier
with EISA bus changes.

Google turns up
http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0301.2/1139.html

Let me add the patch referred to there. Maybe Jeff likes it this time.

 Andries

diff -u --recursive --new-file -X /linux/dontdiff a/drivers/net/3c59x.c b/drivers/net/3c59x.c
--- a/drivers/net/3c59x.c	Sat Jan 18 23:54:39 2003
+++ b/drivers/net/3c59x.c	Tue Jan 21 18:36:25 2003
@@ -1439,8 +1439,14 @@
  		acpi_set_WOL(dev);
 	}
 	retval = register_netdev(dev);
-	if (retval == 0)
+	if (retval == 0) {
+		int i;
+		printk("%s: 3c59x, address", dev->name);
+		for (i = 0; i < 6; i++)
+			printk("%c%2.2x", i ? ':' : ' ', dev->dev_addr[i]);
+		printk("\n");
 		return 0;
+	}
 
 free_ring:
 	pci_free_consistent(pdev,