The HP-PB 100BT driver is _not_ a DLKM, so there would be a reboot when installing it or its patches.
Don't expect much performance wise from an HP-PB 100BT NIC. Frankly, an HP-PB FDDI NIC crippled with a 1500 byte MTU would be faster and more efficient (although you would need one of those klunky Ethernet-FDDI gateways)
WRT Duplex:
How Autoneg is supposed to work:
When both sides of the link are set to autoneg, they will "negotiate"
the duplex setting and select full duplex if both sides can do
full-duplex.
If one side is hardcoded and not using autoneg, the autoneg process
will "fail" and the side trying to autoneg is required by spec to use
half-duplex mode.
If one side is using half-duplex, and the other is using full-duplex,
sorrow and woe is the usual result.
So, the following table shows what will happen given various settings
on each side:
Auto Half Full
Auto Happiness Lucky Sorrow
Half Lucky Happiness Sorrow
Full Sorrow Sorrow Happiness
Happiness means that there is a good shot of everything going well.
Lucky means that things will likely go well, but not because you did
anything correctly :) Sorrow means that there _will_ be a duplex
mis-match.
When there is a duplex mismatch, on the side running half-duplex you
will see various errors and probably a number of late collisions. On
the side running full-duplex you will see things like FCS errors.
Note that those errors a
there is no rest for the wicked yet the virtuous have no pillows
