FireWire module issues on powerpc, worked around
I've been trying to get the list of network interfaces before and after
the first reboot in sync on my PowerBook, so that I stop having to hack
/etc/network/interfaces around while base-config is running to cope with
the fact that discover detects eth1394 after the reboot but not
beforehand. To that end, I added my ohci1394 controller to my local copy
of discover1-data, hoping that Joey's earlier changes to hw-detect would
take care of the rest.
This was partially successful. I now found that Firewire Ethernet showed
up as eth0. Hmm, not ideal: I'd much rather have eth0 be the normal
built-in Ethernet, the way it is after the reboot. It turns out that the
first run of hw-detect, before anna is run and ethdetect is retrieved,
has ohci1394 and eth1394 available to it (since firewire-core-modules is
in the initrd for things like FireWire CD-ROM drives) so probes them
both. It seems pretty suboptimal for it to bring up eth1394 long before
any other interfaces.
To cope with this, I've moved eth1394 from firewire-core-modules to
nic-modules in linux-kernel-di-powerpc-2.6, so that it isn't available
until ethdetect runs. This is fairly simple for powerpc 2.6, as it turns
out that every target that contains nic-modules already contains
firewire-core-modules. However, I hesitated to do this in kernel-wedge
(where IMHO this really should go) because I wasn't sure if i386 had the
same property, and I didn't want to mess with that at this point. At any
rate, with the discover1-data changes my PowerBook gets all its
interfaces in the right order both before and after the first reboot.
Perhaps an i386 person with a FireWire-capable system could see if a
similar change is needed there?
Cheers,
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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