PCI network cards should be reliably detected. But if you are using more than one card, or if the autoprobe should fail to detect your card, you have a way to explicitly tell the kernel about the card's base address and name.
At boot time you can supply arguments and information to the kernel that any of the kernel components may read. This mechanism allows you to pass information to the kernel that Ethernet drivers can use to locate your Ethernet hardware without making the driver probe.
If you use lilo to boot your system, you can pass parameters to the kernel by specifying them through the append option in the lilo.conf file. To inform the kernel about an Ethernet device, you can pass the following parameters:
ether=irq,base_addr,[param1,][param2,]name
The first four parameters are numeric, while the last is the device name. The irq, base_addr, and name parameters are required, but the two param parameters are optional. Any of the numeric values may be set to zero, which causes the kernel to determine the value by probing.
The first parameter sets the IRQ assigned to the device. By default, the kernel will try to autodetect the device's IRQ channel. The 3c503 driver, for example, has a special feature that selects a free IRQ from the list 5, 9, 3, 4 and configures the card to use this line. The base_addr parameter gives the I/O base address of the card; a value of zero tells the kernel to probe the addresses listed above.
Different drivers use the next two parameters differently. For shared-memory cards, such as the WD80x3, they specify starting and ending addresses of the shared memory area. Other cards commonly use param1 to set the level at which debugging information is displayed. Values of 1 through 7 denote increasing levels of verbosity, while 8 turns them off altogether; 0 denotes the default. The 3c503 driver uses param2 to choose between the internal transceiver (default) or an external transceiver (a value of 1). The former uses the card's BNC connector; the latter uses its AUI port. The param arguments need not be included at all if you don't have anything special to configure.
The first non-numeric argument is interpreted by the kernel as the device name. You must specify a device name for each Ethernet card you describe.
If you have two Ethernet cards, you can have Linux autodetect one card and pass the second card's parameters with lilo, but you'll probably want to manually configure both cards. If you decide to have the kernel probe for one and manually configure the second, you must make sure the kernel doesn't accidentally find the second card first, or else the other one won't be registered at all. You do this by passing lilo a reserve option, which explicitly tells the kernel to avoid probing the I/O space taken up by the second card. For instance, to make Linux install a second Ethernet card at 0x300 as eth1, you would pass the following parameters to the kerneclass="underline"
reserve=0x300,32 ether=0,0x300,eth1
The reserve option makes sure no driver accesses the second card's I/O space when probing for some device. You may also use the kernel parameters to override autoprobing for eth0:
reserve=0x340,32 ether=0,0x340,eth0
You can turn off autoprobing altogether. You might do this, for example, to stop a kernel probing for an Ethernet card you might have temporarily removed. Disabling autoprobing is as simple as specifying a base_addr argument of -1:
ether=0,-1,eth0
To supply these parameters to the kernel at boot time, you enter the parameters at the lilo "boot:" prompt. To have lilo give you the "boot:" at the prompt, you must press any one of the Control, Alt or Shift keys while lilo is booting. If you press the Tab key at the prompt, you will be presented with a list of kernels that you may boot. To boot a kernel with parameters supplied, enter the name of the kernel you wish to boot, followed by a space, then followed by the parameters you wish to supply. When you press the Enter key, lilo will load that kernel and boot it with the parameters you've supplied.
To make this change occur automatically on each reboot, enter the parameters into the /etc/lilo.conf using the append= keyword. An example might look like this:
boot=/dev/hda
root=/dev/hda2
install=/boot/boot.b
map=/boot/map
vga=normal
delay=20
append="ether=10,300,eth0"
image=/boot/vmlinuz-2.2.14
label=2.2.14 read-only
After you've edited lilo.conf, you must rerun the lilo command to activate the change.
The PLIP Driver
Parallel Line IP (PLIP) is a cheap way to network when you want to connect only two machines. It uses a parallel port and a special cable, achieving speeds of 10 kilobytes per second to 20 kilobytes per second.
PLIP was originally developed by Crynwr, Inc. Its design at the time was rather ingenious (or, if you prefer, a hack), because the original parallel ports on IBM PCs were designed to spend their time being unidirectional printer ports; the eight data lines could be used only to send data from the PC to the peripheral device, but not the other way around.[21] The Cyrnwr PLIP design worked around this limitation by using the port's five status lines for input, which limited it to transferring all data as nibbles (half bytes) only, but allowed for bidirectional transfer. This mode of operation was called PLIP "mode 0." Today, the parallel ports supplied on PC hardware cater to full bidirectional 8-bit data transfer, and PLIP has been extended to accomodate this with the addition of PLIP "mode 1."
Linux kernels up to and including Version 2.0 support PLIP mode 0 only, and an enhanced parallel port driver exists as a patch against the 2.0 kernel and as a standard part of the 2.2 kernel code to provide PLIP mode 1 operation, too.[22] Unlike earlier versions of the PLIP code, the driver now attempts to be compatible with the PLIP implementations from Crynwr, as well as the PLIP driver in NCSA telnet.[23] To connect two machines using PLIP, you need a special cable sold at some shops as a Null Printer or Turbo Laplink cable. You can, however, make one yourself fairly easily; Appendix B, Useful Cable Configurations shows you how.
The PLIP driver for Linux is the work of almost countless persons. It is currently maintained by Niibe Yutaka.[24] If compiled into the kernel, it sets up a network interface for each of the possible printer ports, with plip0 corresponding to parallel port lp0, plip1 corresponding to lp1, etc. The mapping of interfaces to ports differs in the 2.0 kernels and the 2.2 kernels. In the 2.0 kernels, the mapping was hardwired in the drivers/net/Spacd.c file in the kernel source. The default mappings in this file are:
| Interface | I/O Port | IRQ |
|---|---|---|
| plip0 | 0x3BC | 7 |
| plip1 | 0x378 | 7 |
| plip2 | 0x278 | 5 |
21
Fight to clear the hacking name! Always use "cracker" when you are referring to people who are consciously trying to defeat the security of a system, and "hacker" when you are referring to people who have found a clever way of solving a problem. Hackers can be crackers, but the two should never be confused. Consult the New Hackers Dictionary (popularly found as the Jargon file) for a more complete understanding of the terms.
22
The enhanced parallel port adaptor patch for 2.0 kernel is available from http://www.cyberelk.demon.co.uk/parport.html.
23
NCSA telnet is a popular program for DOS that runs TCP/IP over Ethernet or PLIP, and supports telnet and FTP.