Grant Edwards <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I've never seen an Ethernet chip with a non-volatile MAC.
Many MACs have an interface for a serial EEPROM from which they fetch the MAC address and other initialization data automatically on reset. The manufacturer usually installs the MAC address. Admittedly this is more common for PCI MAC cards that in embedded devices, but I've seen it on development boards too. > > On all of the products I've ever worked on, software had to > read the MAC from some non-volatile memory location and program > the Ethernet chip on startup. What strikes me as odd is that > eCos Ethernet drivers don't seem to have a way for application > code to get that MAC address to them. Ethernet drivers appear > to be expected to "just know" what MAC to write to the Ethernet > controller during initialization. In general the MAC address is stored in the fconfig data. All drivers that need to set the MAC address contain code to query the flash and fetch the MAC address from there, or call a platform-specific function than may do that. They usually also have a fallback to a compiled-in MAC address. -- Nick Garnett eCos Kernel Architect http://www.ecoscentric.com The eCos and RedBoot experts -- Before posting, please read the FAQ: http://ecos.sourceware.org/fom/ecos and search the list archive: http://ecos.sourceware.org/ml/ecos-discuss
