NIC Identification
 

I've noticed when I insert different wireless PCMCIA NICs and do an ifconfig sometimes they show up as wifi0, wlan0, ath0, etc.....

What differentiates the hardware??? Is it the way the kernel identifies the chipset?

I would expect when you insert a wireless NIC it would always show up as wifi0, wifi1, etc....

Thank you.

Hi,

If your question is "What differentiates the hardware?" then I shal try to answer it .....otherwise, this may not be much relevant ...


The different hardware are differentiated only by the interface they are associated to .


One interesting thing about kernels is that they provide standard interfaces to differnet devices, meaning they assume a black box, which takes some input and which gives some output. Keeping in view this blakc box, the whole kernel is done assuming that the black box functionality is available already. It is upto the device drivers (for the particular device given by the interface) to fill the inside of the blackbox to ACTUALLY PROVIDE the services that the box claims to give.

For example, kernels define a standard interface for ethernet cards, and every ethernet card that you install in the system aims to fill in the interface black box that has already been provided with the kernel. These interface names are given (usually) in sequential order i.e. eth0,eth1 etc.

Did you observe that even though the interface names have a common index, different ethernet cards may have differnet set of drivers ? This is possible only because even if both drivers are different, they just implement the interface of an ethernet card provided by the kernel.

With this, I can tell you that the chipset or any other hardware may not be a problem as long as the kernel cna have a standard interface for it, and the chipsset driver can actually fill in the interface blackbox.

Hope this answered the question.

Regards.

vijfita,

Yes! That helped a lot in answering my question.

Thank you for taking the time to reply!

Brian