I have a friend who's trying to install Debian on his PC, a Gateway 2000 of some kind.
He tells me it has a Soundblaster (quite a recent version, I believe), on the same IRQ as the default ethercard IRQ, which he thinks is IRQ5. The ethercard is a "plug and play" 3c509. Trying to load the 3c509 kernel module produces a simple message about the failure to initialise the card. (a) Can I pass command line arguments to the 3c509 module, so that I can tell it to use a different IRQ ? (I know that I could do this if the driver were compiled into the kernel image, but it isn't in Debian's kernel.) (b) Is there a kernel command line option to `allocate' a particular IRQ, a la the `reserve' parameter for I/O ports ? If so I could perhaps use this to prevent the ethercard from going for IRQ5. (c) Or, should I just compile a custom kernel for him ? Is this an adequate solution in general for this kind of problem ? As a second problem, the sbpcd driver spends an awfully long time during its probe - it (apparently) probes 29 different addresses before finding his card, and each probe takes about 5 seconds. This is clearly unacceptable. I have worked around the problem by removing the sbpcd module from /etc/modules, but this is clearly not adequate in the long run. Perhaps the sbpcd driver should be removed from the available modules list, or have a warning attached, or something ? Ian.
