Linux Network Administrator's Guide, Second Edition

Chapter 3. Configuring the Networking Hardware

We’ve been talking quite a bit about network interfaces and general TCP/IP issues, but we haven’t really covered what happens when the “networking code” in the kernel accesses a piece of hardware. In order to describe this accurately, we have to talk a little about the concept of interfaces and drivers.

First, of course, there’s the hardware itself, for example an Ethernet, FDDI or Token Ring card: this is a slice of Epoxy cluttered with lots of tiny chips with strange numbers on them, sitting in a slot of your PC. This is what we generally call a physical device.

For you to use a network card, special functions have to be present in your Linux kernel that understand the particular way this device is accessed. The software that implements these functions is called a device driver. Linux has device drivers for many different types of network interface cards: ISA, PCI, MCA, EISA, Parallel port, PCMCIA, and more recently, USB.

But what do we mean when we say a driver “handles” a device? Let’s consider an Ethernet card. The driver has to be able to communicate with the peripheral’s on-card logic somehow: it has to send commands and data to the card, while the card should deliver any data received to the driver.

In IBM-style personal computers, this communication takes place through a cluster of I/O addresses that are mapped to registers on the card and/or through shared or direct memory transfers. All commands and data the kernel sends ...