invalid ioctls and et131x ethernet driver

I have a laptop -- and LG T1 laptop-- which happens to have an Agere ET1310
ethernet card. Linux has no driver but there is one on sourcforge, which
seems to work. However there are two features which are confusing me.
a) Each time I boot up the ethernet card is given a different label eth3 eth4 eth5--
it seems to be stepping up the number ladder. In a few months I am looking
forward to eth197332, which is silly. Is there any reason why this should
be happening and how I could stop it from happening. How in the world are
those number assigned anyway?

b) I am getting a lot of Invalid ioctl warnings in dmesg. Looking at the
code to the et131x driver the card seems to support only the three ioctls
SIOCGMIIPHY, SIOCGMIIREG and SIOCSMIIREG
All other ioctls generate the warning. Is this a dangerous state of
affairs, or should I just accept my dmesg filling up with these error
messages. I suppose it is ifplugd that is trying to query the card
constatly generating the ioctls, but have not tried shutting ifplugd down.

On Sep 16, 11:09 pm, Bill Unruh <un...@physics.ubc.ca> wrote:
> I have a laptop -- and LG T1 laptop-- which happens to have an Agere ET1310
> ethernet card. Linux has no driver but there is one on sourcforge, which
> seems to work. However there are two features which are confusing me.
> a) Each time I boot up the ethernet card is given a different label eth3 eth4 eth5--
> it seems to be stepping up the number ladder. In a few months I am looking
> forward to eth197332, which is silly. Is there any reason why this should
> be happening and how I could stop it from happening. How in the world are
> those number assigned anyway?
>
> b) I am getting a lot of Invalid ioctl warnings in dmesg. Looking at the
> code to the et131x driver the card seems to support only the three ioctls
> SIOCGMIIPHY, SIOCGMIIREG and SIOCSMIIREG
> All other ioctls generate the warning. Is this a dangerous state of
> affairs, or should I just accept my dmesg filling up with these error
> messages. I suppose it is ifplugd that is trying to query the card
> constatly generating the ioctls, but have not tried shutting ifplugd down.

better change the card the reason behind that is netdivce structure is
always getting incremented and pointing
to lastchange + 1