Hi Wolfgang,

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 10:09:38AM +0100, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
quoted text
> Dear David,
> 
> on Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 01:49:57AM -0700, David Miller wrote:
> > From: Sascha Hauer <s.hauer@pengutronix.de>
> > Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 09:44:30 +0100
> > 
> > > On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 09:18:41PM -0700, Stephen Hemminger wrote:
> > > > Do you still need this? Only works with one board, configuration via
> > > > module parameters is discouraged.  Same effect can be done by setting
> > > > mac address with regular tools.
> > > 
> > > Except for root over nfs. Ok, the answer to this is usually 'use
> > > initrd', but this is still a pita on embedded systems.
> > 
> > Please remove this code.  If we let you do it, we have to let everyone
> > else do it too, and that's something we don't want to do.
> > 
> > There are other ways you can handle this, for example have your board
> > firmware properly program the MAC address into the card at power-on,
> > and then have the driver here look in the MAC address registers to see
> > if a valid ethernet address has been left there.
> 
> How do you then handle situations where this is impossible? Say, when
> the firmware cannot write to those registers for example because  the
> ethernet  controller is not even powered on (to reduce power consump-
> tion), but will get powered on only in Linux  when  the  driver  gets
> loaded (i. e. on demand only, not always)?

I never had this situation, but I guess in this case I have a working
userspace and can use ifconfig to set the MAC address.

Sascha

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