Detection of PCI network devices

[Frank Mehnert]

Hi,

I'm not a reader of this mailing list I'm apologizing if this note was send
to this list before.

Until now, it is almost impossible to configure GRUB to work for more than
one PCI netdevice. Why? Because the detection algorithm has two cycles:

First, scan the PCI bios for known network devices (drivers, we compiled
into GRUB on ./configure). Store the PCI addresses of all that know cards
into pci_ioaddrs (an array of 16 entries).

Second, go to the probe function of each network driver letting him probe
if the belonging network card is installed. Most (all?) drivers for PCI
network card only scan the first address of the pci_ioaddr array.

In my opinion, I would be better to assign known PCI device codes to
drivers, e.g. the tulip driver only uses PCI devices of cards which has
a known PCI device code for the Tulip card. Not one array pci_nic_list
but as many arrays as many drivers for PCI network cards are compiled in.

That feature would be fine, you could include network support for most
of the network cards GRUB supports into the officical Debian package.

Frank
-- 
Frank Mehnert
## Dept. of Computer Science, Dresden University of Technology, Germany ##
## E-Mail: address@hidden    http://os.inf.tu-dresden.de/~fm3 ##