Linux Network Administrator's Guide, Second Edition

Ethernet Installation

The current Linux network code supports a large variety of Ethernet cards. Most drivers were written by Donald Becker, who authored a family of drivers for cards based on the National Semiconductor 8390 chip; these have become known as the Becker Series Drivers. Many other developers have contributed drivers, and today there are few common Ethernet cards that aren’t supported by Linux. The list of supported Ethernet cards is growing all the time, so if your card isn’t supported yet, chances are it will be soon.

Sometime earlier in Linux’s history we would have attempted to list all supported Ethernet cards, but that would now take too much time and space. Fortunately, Paul Gortmaker maintains the Ethernet HOWTO, which lists each of the supported cards and provides useful information about getting each of them running under Linux.^[20] It is posted monthly to the comp.os.linux.answers newsgroup, and is also available on any of the Linux Documentation Project mirror sites.

Even if you are confident you know how to install a particular type of Ethernet card in your machine, it is often worthwhile taking a look at what the Ethernet HOWTO has to say about it. You will find information that extends beyond simple configuration issues. For example, it could save you a lot of headaches to know the behavior of some DMA-based Ethernet cards that use the same DMA channel as the Adaptec 1542 SCSI controller by default. Unless you move one of them to a different ...