With the awi driver, as far as I can tell from the documentation,
   it *can't* get the ethernet address out of the card until it
   completes its self tests

"never mind".

It appears that the card also has its mac address in its CIS records,
which is accessible at attach time.  Amazingly enough, there appears
to be a fairly standard way to do this across all PCMCIA NIC's.
(excuse me for my astonishment at pc-class hardware getting something
like this correct.. :-) )

Going even further off the deep end...

Support for binding cards to device instances by mac address would
therefore appear to be somewhat more straightforward than I had
previously thought.  It may be a bit of a stretch, but you could even
use the mac address as something like a locator.  

Compiling mac addresses into a kernel would be .. wrong .. but once a
device had been attached using a wildcard config entry, it doesn't
seem all that unreasonable to allow (but not require) the system to
operate in a mode where the binding from mac address to device
instance was remembered.

					- Bill