On Mon, Dec 11, 2017 at 06:22:29PM +0100, Martin Pieuchot wrote: > The only difference I see is that the MAC address has to be read from > the EEPROM. It's not clear to me if Linux does that for all models, > hence my question.
As the comment in the code where this mountroot hook is installed implies, the only reason it loads firmware at boot is that it wants to show you the device model, firmware version, and MAC address in dmesg. The MAC address cannot be read before firmware is loaded. All other drivers have a way to read the MAC address without loading firmware, but not this one. So the answer to your question is another question: Should it not show the MAC address in dmesg? So far, every driver shows the MAC in dmesg. Anyway, I don't see any reason to change this behaviour. iwm has always worked this way, and all my diff is trying to do is to reduce user confusion where the driver is whining about errors that are expected.
