Re: [RULE] does Slinky detect do ISA?

[Paul Nijjar]

On Sun, 29 Feb 2004, drose wrote:

> On Sun, 2004-02-29 at 20:17, Vegard Munthe wrote:
>
> Regarding hardware detection in general, is it possible to have a piece
> of software which can see that there's an ISA card at 0x300, IRQ 12 (for
> example) wihtout having to know what it is or how to use it, or is
> loading a driver and using the hardware the only way to find out the
> details?

        As has been mentioned before, it depends on whether your card is
standard ISA or plug-and-play (PnP). If the card does not have jumpers it
may be PnP. In that case isa-pnp kernel module can help, and so can the
"pnpdump" command from isapnptools.

        The best detection device I have found for network cards is the
kernel itself. I use FAI for Debian to install machines. It comes with a
kernel that has most network card drivers built into the kernel (as
opposed to being compiled as modules). Looking at the bootup messages for
that special kernel usually works very well for me. However, the overhead
for setting up such a routine for yourself may be large. One possibility
is to set up a FAI server, but I would not recommend that. Another is to
compile a kernel yourself with all network cards loaded in, and then just
use YARD or some other floppy-based distro to get information on bootup.

        I don't know why the kernel does better detection than discover or
detect, but I have noticed that it does.

- Paul