Subject: Re: [PATCH] dm9601: handle corrupt mac address

From: David Brownell <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 6 Jan 2009 02:28:16 -0800

On Tuesday 06 January 2009, Peter Korsgaard wrote:
> So what happens if you plug in 2 devices without an EEPROM? Do they
> get the same MAC address? That seems broken.

What happens when you unplug one then re-plug it?  Maybe
someone trips over the USB cable, or it gets an electrical
glitch that evalutes to disconnect/reconnect... It gets
the same address again.  Not particularly broken.

Note that Ethernet was *designed* around using a single
address per host ... I still have XNS docs sitting around
somewhere, that was a fairly significant thing.  One of the
original reasons Ethernet adapter addresses could change
was to make sure that all Ethernet interfaces on a host
would use the same address.

That said ... if it bothers you, that's easy to change
in userspace.  This code has worked this way for around
nine years now; I don't recall any previous complaints.

- Dave