Disclaimer: I am not responsible for anything may be caused by applying procedures described in this material, including loss of data, physical damage, service disruption, or damage of any kind. Use at your own risk!

Background: I have recently bought a cardbus pcmcia Realtek 8139 card, and tryed to set it up on my RedHat 7.3 box. It works perfectly with the 8139too module, but the init scripts "insist" on loading 8139cp instead.

The 8139cp driver claims the card chip is not supported:

8139cp 10/100 PCI Ethernet driver v0.0.7 (Feb 27, 2002)
8139cp: pci dev 02:00.0 (id 10ec:8139 rev 10) is not an 8139C+ compatible chip
8139cp: Try the "8139too" driver instead.

After two hours of digging through config files and scripts, I figured out what really happened. Cardbus pcmcia cards are in fact 32-bit pci devices. That means they will be reachable through the pci bus (actually through a pci-cardbus bridge), and listed by 'lspci'.

However, pcmcia cards are hotpluggable devices. When the kernel detects a new hotpluggable device, it invokes an utility that is responsible for loading the appropriate modules into the kernel. The utility is provided by the "hotplug" package, and it is used for all the hotpluggable devices (including usb).

The funny thing is that cardmgr would never load the modules itself for a cardbus card, even if the correct manufacturer id (or any other identification means) is present in the '/etc/pcmcia/config' file. Instead /etc/hotplug/pci.agent is invoked to load the appropriate modules.

The correct module is identified through the pci id (two 4-digit hex numbers). The id is looked up in a mapping table, and then the module is loaded into the kernel. The mapping table is located in /lib/modules/<kernel version>/modules.pcimap. In my modules.pcimap file there was a single line containing 8139cp followed by many lines containing 8139too. So I removed the line with 8139cp and... surprise! Everything worked fine.

But... the modules.pcimap is generated by depmod, and depmod is run by the startup scripts at every boot. My "quick hack" solution was to add the following line at the beginning of /etc/modules.conf:

pcimapfile=/tmp/modules.pcimap

That line tells depmod to create the file as "/tmp/modules.pcimap", so the real map file is not overwritten. That's all.

If you know how to make depmod exclude 8139cp from the pcimap file, please drop me an e-mail :)