* Jeremy Jackson jerj@coplanar.net [070611 19:36]:
Nonetheless, you can make sure it does not happen by unloading the network card module.
Well unloading the driver seems a bit clumsy, and a contradiction really. (unloading a driver to use hardware). I would add the flash ROM functionality to the NIC driver, and have it export an MTD map. The space.c stub implementation would just return EBUSY if the interface is up, but specific drivers could enable interleaved access as they are able.
Still, it has to disable all it's memory and io resources before the rom resource can be used reliably. This is equal to unloading the module, no matter whether you really unload or not.
Adding this to the NIC driver sounds like an interesting approach.