3c509 loadable module - arguments ?
I have a friend who's trying to install Debian on his PC, a Gateway
2000 of some kind.
He tells me it has a Soundblaster (quite a recent version, I believe),
on the same IRQ as the default ethercard IRQ, which he thinks is IRQ5.
The ethercard is a "plug and play" 3c509.
Trying to load the 3c509 kernel module produces a simple message about
the failure to initialise the card.
(a) Can I pass command line arguments to the 3c509 module, so that I
can tell it to use a different IRQ ? (I know that I could do this if
the driver were compiled into the kernel image, but it isn't in
Debian's kernel.)
(b) Is there a kernel command line option to `allocate' a particular
IRQ, a la the `reserve' parameter for I/O ports ? If so I could
perhaps use this to prevent the ethercard from going for IRQ5.
(c) Or, should I just compile a custom kernel for him ? Is this an
adequate solution in general for this kind of problem ?
As a second problem, the sbpcd driver spends an awfully long time
during its probe - it (apparently) probes 29 different addresses
before finding his card, and each probe takes about 5 seconds. This
is clearly unacceptable. I have worked around the problem by removing
the sbpcd module from /etc/modules, but this is clearly not adequate
in the long run. Perhaps the sbpcd driver should be removed from the
available modules list, or have a warning attached, or something ?
Ian.
Reply to: