[etherlab-users] How to only use one adapter for EtherCAT??

[Gavin Lambert]

Quoth Fredrik Viksten:
> How would I go about setting the system up so I can A) use NIC eth0 for
> normal network traffic and B) use an EtherCAT-optimized kernel driver
> for NIC eth1 when they are both using the same chipset?

All you should need to do is to explicitly specify the MAC that you want to use for EtherCAT in the /etc/sysconfig/ethercat file, and let it load the EtherCAT-optimised driver as normal.

The modified driver includes checks to see whether it's being used in EtherCAT mode or not for each individual instance, so the EtherCAT one will operate in optimised polling mode and the Ethernet one will operate in regular interrupt mode.

You may also need to edit additional config files to avoid treating it as a standard Ethernet port (eg. DHCP, network management, etc), but that will vary by distribution.  I can't really help with that as I've only used EtherCAT on small systems (no GUI, minimal number of installed packages).