From owner-freebsd-stable Wed Aug 23 8: 5:28 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from mail.wolves.k12.mo.us (mail.wolves.k12.mo.us [207.160.214.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1943437B43C for ; Wed, 23 Aug 2000 08:05:19 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mail.wolves.k12.mo.us (cdillon@mail.wolves.k12.mo.us [207.160.214.1]) by mail.wolves.k12.mo.us (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id KAA72261; Wed, 23 Aug 2000 10:05:12 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us) Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2000 10:05:12 -0500 (CDT) From: Chris Dillon To: Smith@ian.org Cc: Dermot McNally , freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG, Fred Clift Subject: Re: Numbering of fxp devices In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Tue, 22 Aug 2000 Smith@ian.org wrote: > On Tue, 22 Aug 2000, Chris Dillon wrote: > > 7 NICs, one of which is dual-port, for a total of 8 ports. I recently > > moved all of those NICs from a Compaq Proliant 3000 running 3.4-STABLE > > into a new Proliant ML530 running 4.1-STABLE. The card order is > > definately weird, but that isn't so much FreeBSD's fault. Compaq was > > nice enough to label primary, secondary, and tertiary PCI bus slots on > > the back of the machine, but they aren't in order anyway. What I > > ended up doing was booting the system with all the cards installed, > > noting the MAC address of each interface, and then comparing that to > > physical slot locations. Not as nice as the sequential ordering in > > the Proliant 3000, but not a big deal either, as long as it doesn't > > change on me in the future without some warning. :-) > > Might I ask what 2-port card you are using? I have a router with > limited slots.. 3 ethernet and four T1 ports currently. The Intel dual-port. > I also wonder if there woudl be a way to map cards based on their > MAC addresses, or is the MAC address discovery done way too late? Way too late, I think, since the driver would have to attach before it could even query the card for its MAC address. If it were able to get the MAC, detach, re-attach, etc. until the right order was reached, that might work. > Hmm.. maybe some sort of aliasing? A conf file could list device > numbers and MAC addresses, so once the kernel finished finding > everything, it could look through the cards and asign /dev/ether0 > to one, /dev/ether1 to another, ect. Thats an idea, too... > Thinking on that.. I do like the aliasing idea. Maybe a > /dev/ethernet/ directory where each card is listed by it's MAC > address, then given symbolic names to create normal /dev entries > that also get listed with ifconfig and such. Yeah! I like that. I'll bet someone will come along and tell us why it isn't feasable, though. The biggest problem I can see is that network devices have never had device nodes, so they would truly have to be "symbolic" in more than one sense. :-) -- Chris Dillon - cdillon@wolves.k12.mo.us - cdillon@inter-linc.net FreeBSD: The fastest and most stable server OS on the planet. For Intel x86 and Alpha architectures. ( http://www.freebsd.org ) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message