As this looks like it's becoming a Frequently Asked Question, I'll send this note to a wider audience. Please forgive me if this is obvious to most of the folks on this list.
After flashing or upgrading distros or bootloaders, some folks have been noticing that their "usb0" network interface on the *host* side fails to appear when the Freerunner is plugged into the USB port. Alert users have noticed that it didn't really fail to appear, rather it changed name from "usb0" to "eth1" (or "eth2", etc). What's happening here is that certain bootloaders and certain distros have begun to use the official USB mac address assigned by Openmoko to the Freerunner, instead of letting the kernel generate a random address in the locally-assigned range. Many hosts will respond differently when they observe the official (static) mac address; instead of creating the "usb0" interface, they will create and permanently assign an "eth<n>" interface name to that mac address. Clearly the latter is the correct way for things to work -- not only does it make certain network managers on the hosts happier, it also permits one to keep one's sanity when plugging multiple devices into a host. The combination of the Qi bootloader and any kernel with g_ether built-in will use the official mac address. If g_ether is a module, then the decision to use the official mac address is up to the distro itself. As of the writing of this email, the Android b6 distro is known to use the official mac address. The SHR "testing" distro will use the official mac address when booted with Qi, but not when booted with u-boot. The SHE "unstable" builds fix this inconsistency and will use the official mac address with either bootloader. One final note - a big thank you to Sebastian Wiedenroth for assistance with this for SHR, and especially for finding a current issue with the way Qi handles the official mac addresses (specifically, Qi assigns the same mac address to both the device and host sides, which fails to work with OS X, as well as resulting in duplicate IPV6 addresses -- SHR has implemented a work-around to avoid this problem). Regards, Mike (mwester) PS: a first cut at updating the wiki has been made, I urge folks to correct and expand as they feel necessary: http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/USB_Networking _______________________________________________ devel mailing list devel@lists.openmoko.org https://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
