Upgrading to Athros from PCI cards

[David L. Vrablic]

I had a little shake up when we changed a radio from PCI (adapter and PCMCIA radio) to the new Dlink Athros card.
We swapped out the first card and all the settings moved down a notch.

We had saved the configs before we started but that doesn't help as you can directly reload them.
Each channel had to be re configured manually.
I understand it is because the scheme is card dependant.
Is there a way to make it slot dependant?
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I just wondered if there was something I was missing and as I havn't seen it mentioned on the forum I thought I might save someone a little trouble if I brought it to light.

[bobbyc]

For this very reason, I built a new box in the office that I am taking up to the tower this weekend. It's basically a duplicate of the system we have up there right now, but it has a AG520 card in the last slot. I think the current cpu up at the tower right now has a empty slot, but it is between the other .b cards so the card order might get messed up if I were to put the AG520 card in.
Bob C

[georgew]

Any time you move cards around in a unix box you should expect the device numbers to change. You can try to predict it, but you cannot force it to do what it does not want to do. So you pretty much need to plan on reconfiguring all of the devices.

This was discussed in a couple recent threads, it's just one of those common unix problems.

[timo]

What you're describing is a standard function of PCI. For this reason, I always start at the very first slot and add cards. If you pull the first card, you need to be prepared for a complete reconfig. It's best to have a duplicate machine config'ed on hand and ready to connect.

[David L. Vrablic]

Thanks guys,
I was just wondering if there was something I was missing.
I thought I would go first class back in the BSD days but time has proved that this was the wrong way to go.

These boxes of mine are rack mounted with passive backplane and a SBC computer board. They are the full boat multi sector main station boxes with back hauls.
My plans were to have chs 1,6,11 then an odd one x pol for backhaul.
When avail I would change the BH radio to 5.x and be all set.
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A rack mount ATX case with all PCI slots and a decent CPU would be the way to go now.
The IRQ assignments and mem addresses on these things are a nightmare.
So natch I thought it was something to do with my boxes.
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They only have four true resource slots and when you add the forth radio card all kinds of wierd starts to happen when they get a load on them.
It has to share the forth ID with anything else in the box.
Even a NIC can suffer.
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It looks like direct swapouts will be the norm for any WPCI upgrades from now on.
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Oh yes before I forget. it wasn't the fact that I removed the PCMCIA adapter from slot 1.
It was that I replaced it with a WPCI card that changed all the settings.
It had the same effect as removing it completely.

[butchkemper]

The configuration is affected by at least two things: the order of the devices in the PCI slots and the order in which Linux detects the devices.

Changing a card in the PCI slot from one device type to another will change the configuration if the new device is detected in a different sequence from the original device.

Butch

[tony]

That is correct.

Each brand of device is configured in order, so if you have two PCI Prism 2.5 cards, and two PCI Atheros cards, the two Prism 2.5 cards will alsways be wpci1 and wpci2, regardless of the slot ordering, as they are detected first.