Re: hotplug e1000 failed after 32 times

[Li Shaohua <shaohua.li@intel.com>]

On Sat, 2004-09-18 at 07:34, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> All this work and code for such an uncommon case??
> 
> First off, any settings which are _indexed_ are almost guaranteed 
> broken.  For reasons as we see here, and others.  Any 
> "setting_foo[board_number]" should be found and eliminated instead.
> 
> Even if you allocate and free board numbers as described, how precisely 
> do you propose to predict which settings belong to which hotplugged 
> board?  Look at the problem, and you realize that the board<->setting 
> association becomes effectively _random_ for any adapter not present at 
> modprobe time.
> 
> The best model is to set these settings via netlink/ethtool after 
> registering the interface, but before bringing it up.
I'm not familiar with the NIC driver, but this problem really is
annoying. The gurus, please consider a solution. It's not an uncommon
case. I believe it's common in a big system with hotplug support. I can
understand why the driver doesn't support more than 32 a card, but one
card with 32 times hotplug failed is a little ugly.

Thanks,
Shaohua