Hi,

I recently brought up Linux on a small single board computer (an Axiom SBC8242VE) to use as a small server.

Linux - in this case Debian 3.0 "Woody" with a 2.2.20-idepci kernel - came up pretty smoothly, except I had to manually enter the device IO address for the ethernet chip, a RealTek 8019. The chip appears at 0x220 instead of the default 0x300, so I had to set io=0x220 in the "ne" driver with modconf. With that fix, ethernet came up fine.

So then I decide I want to run smbfs on the system, and for that I
need a 2.4 kernel. So I did a kernel image install (2.4.18-bf2.4),
and it came up just fine, except for the Ethernet. After a few hours of poking around, I found that the "isa-pnp" was finding the card first, and for some mysterious reason, making it vanish. Here's what I see during boot in the 2.4.18-bf2.4 kernel:

isapnp: Scanning for PnP cards...
isapnp: Card 'Realtek Plug & Play Ethernet Card'
isapnp: 1 Plug & Play card detected total
ne.c: No NE*000 card found at i/o = 0x220
isapnp: Scanning for PnP cards...
isapnp: Card 'Realtek Plug & Play Ethernet Card'
isapnp: 1 Plug & Play card detected total

vs. the succussful 2.2.20 kernel:

ne.c:v1.10 9/23/94 Donald Becker (becker@cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov)
NE*000 ethercard probe at 0x220: 52 54 4c 19 10 ff
eth0: NE2000 found at 0x220, using IRQ 12.

Here's what's really strange: After the 2.2 kernel boots, I can
successfully probe the card using "ne2k-diag -p 0x220" and see that it's there. But when it boots in 2.4 ne2k-diag simply can't see the ethernet chip anymore, no matter what address I probe for it at. It's like it's been ripped off the card, at least until I reset the system.

I tried creating an /etc/idapnp.conf file and pointing isa-pnp to it
with modconf, but I really can't tell if the ida-pnp kernel module
even reads config files.

Any clues about how I would make the 2.4 kernel recognize the chip? Why does it seem to vanish after isapnp claims to detect it?

Much thanks,
jp

Since nobody replied, I might as well answer it myself: The problem was the
option ne io=0x220
in the modules.conf file left over from the 2.2 kernel. This was needed in the 2.2 kernel (because it couldn't find the card automatically). In the 2.4 kernel, it is not only redundant, it actually causes the ne driver to fail. Just taking that line out cured the problem; the card was succesfully detected with
isa-pnp and the ne driver works fine.

FYI,
jp

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