On Tue, Sep 08, 2020 at 10:14:15AM +0200, Andre Heider wrote: > On 08/09/2020 09:42, Pali Rohár wrote: > > On Tuesday 08 September 2020 08:35:00 Andre Heider wrote: > > > The hardware does not provide a MAC address. Enable this so that > > > network access works with just the default environment. > > > > Well, this is not fully truth as MAC address is stored in SPI, just in > > non-standard format, in U-Boot env stored in env partition and it is > > hard to use outside of U-Boot, plus easy to erase / overwrite / lost. > > True, but updating the bootloader usually implies wiping the env, so it's > very easy to lose it.
It most certainly should NOT wipe out the existing environment, it should be using the same environment location as before. > > I'm not a big fan of this change. This looks like a workaround / hack > > for boards where MAC address was erased (e.g. by broken U-Boot distro > > scripts) or for early boards where MAC address was not written at all > > (as I was told). > > > > And on these boards this patch would cause that U-Boot would see on > > every boot different MAC address. This would cause another mess in > > network for U-Boot netboot as DHCP/TFTP server would see for one board > > every time different MAC address. > > > > Is not really better to instruct user how to fix board where e.g. broken > > distro scripts erased MAC address? We have already paragraph in > > README.marvell about it. > > > > Also this change affects "default" defconfig value. And based on above > > arguments I do not think that this change should be enabled by default. > > > > I understand that for some situations it may be useful (e.g. mass board > > reparation process via netboot), but as this is config option, users in > > such situation can enable this option manually. > > > > I think that for default behavior is not provide network access in > > U-Boot if for some reasons factory permanent MAC address was removed. > > User can easier and faster detect this issue and fix it. > > It can be argued both ways I guess. If this option wouldn't make sense it > wouldn't exist. > > Out of the box working network access is probably what most users care > about. > > Changing this default means that you need to build the whole firmware > yourself, and let's face it: building it for this board is a total > clusterfuck. Most users will just download a binary. I don't care too much > for this patch, but I would consider what fits most users. > > Right now most users will probably run the downstream binaries provided by > armbian, and as you know, that even has single hardcoded MAC, used for all > boards. So this would already be an improvement ;) Note that when CONFIG_NET_RANDOM_ETHADDR is set, we only use a random MAC address when we haven't found one either on the hardware or environment. It also prints a warning that you are using a random MAC, so if it's documented on how to recover the real MAC a user should see that warning and fix it. -- Tom
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
