Hi Sebastien, > > I'm confused as to why this is desirable when the mac address > > can already be configured after module insertion via > > smsc95xx_netdev_ops.eth_mac_addr(). > > For example for booting over NFS using a pre-defined MAC address, with > a minimal setup (no initrd). Or is there another way to force a MAC > address for this use-case?
I can't see an existing way of specifying this as a kernel parameter in Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt. netdev= doesn't have a mac address parameter. During development I initially had smsc95xx driver using this logic to select a MAC address: 1. If net->dev_addr has already been set to a valid mac address (i.e. by an administrator before bringing the device up) then use that address. 2. If the device is already currently set to a valid mac address then use that address. This could have been set by either the device's EEPROM or by a previously running bootloader. 3. Generate a random mac address. Unfortunately, this doesn't work so well as the usbnet framework sets net->dev_addr to the USB node_id before calling our bind function, so we usually matched at step 1 (and not with the desired outcome). So I removed step 1 because, as Simon mentioned, it's possible to change the mac address after the device is brought up. I can see you have a different use case, but I don't think this specific driver is the place for this logic. I'd rather see it added to either the usbnet framework or (preferably) the netdev framework so *all* ethernet drivers can do this the same way. otherwise we could end up with slight variations of this code in every single driver! Steve -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-omap" in the body of a message to majord...@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
