Subject: Re: [PATCH] dnet: Dave DNET ethernet controller driver

From: Christer Weinigel <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:56:06 +0100

David Miller wrote:

> From: Sascha Hauer <[email-masked]>
> Date: Wed, 11 Mar 2009 09:44:30 +0100

 > > [some code to pass the MAC address as module parameters]

> 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.

It's still a pain to have to do this.  Many embedded systems that I have 
seen have a bootloader which I can't modify to do that, but the 
bootloader allows me to save the kernel command line into some kind of 
volatile storage.  Så being able to set the MAC address with a:

     setenv cmdline foo.hwaddr=00:de:ad:be:ef:ed

is very nice because it allows me to use a NFS root without having to 
jump through hoops with initrds an such.

Actually, I wish we had a generic way of doing that, so that could set 
the mac address of any ethernet interface from the kernel command in a 
nice and supported way.

   /Christer