At boot time you can supply arguments and information to the kernel that any of the kernel components may read. This mechanism allows you to pass information to the kernel that Ethernet drivers can use to locate your Ethernet hardware without making the driver probe. If you use lilo to boot your system, you can pass parameters to the kernel by specifying them through the append option in the lilo.conf file. The first parameter sets the IRQ assigned to the device. By default, the kernel will try to autodetect the device's IRQ channel.
Different drivers use the next two parameters differently.
For shared-memory cards, such as the WD80x3, they specify starting and ending addresses of the shared memory area. Other cards commonly use param1 to set the level at which debugging information is displayed. The param arguments need not be included at all if you don't have anything special to configure. The first non-numeric argument is interpreted by the kernel as the device name. You must specify a device name for each Ethernet card you describe.