07 Nov 2003

Fri, 07 Nov 2003

Linuxant DriverLoader Bugs

Well, taking the good with the bad, it turns out that the linuxant driverloader that I mentioned a couple days ago has bugs. No suprise there. The fact that it works at all is a small miracle. The bugs go like this... When I installed it, I had an eth0 and eth1 interfaces on the box. It created it's own eth0, destroying the 100 Mbit device that was there in the process. Linuxant tech support did finally respond and say yeah, that's a problem. Mark Boucher from Linuxant responds:

The problem with eth0 vs eth1 isn't driverloader-specific but a consequence of how network devices are registered and their names allocated under linux. Basically the instance number isn't persistent but set according to the order in which the devices are initialized. So a newly installed device which ends up being started before an existing one might be assigned the latter's slot by the kernel, which is what happened on your system. We would very much appreciate if you could correct the text on your website since it unfairly blames DriverLoader for this problem. When searching Google for "linuxant driverloader" your site comes up quite early and new users or potential customers could misinterpret your comments. Btw in version 1.25 we have added the --netdevname option to dldrconfig so that the "eth" prefix can be changed to something else in order to avoid any collisions with existing ethernet devices. We cannot use another name by default since some distributions and tools only recognize "eth" devices.

Also, I wrote to them last night to ask them exactly what you're supposed to do when you upgrade kernels, which isn't exactly clear, since the device has to be compiled against the current kernel and the driverloader configuration was not migrated when I updated kernels last night.

Mark Boucher of Linuxant responds:
After booting a new kernel just run "dldrconfig --kernel" (optionally with --auto to make the process automatic). This question is answered in our FAQ at http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/wlan/faq.php#17

Posted at: 11:24 | permalink