* Peter Stuge stuge-linuxbios@cdy.org [070319 23:59]:
it just ignores the 16 bytes at ffffffd0
Ok, sorry if I'm daft, but how does the MAC address end up in the LinuxBIOS rom file?
Or, aha, did you mean "This is only for the case that a factory image was previously flashed." instead of the other way around?
No, it does not help that problem. Above line only helps when updating from an old working LinuxBIOS to a new one.
For getting the mac address from the machine's legacy bios, we would have to add a whole bunch of logic to flashrom:
* Determine that it's a transition from awardbios to linuxbios (safely) * read the mac address (will it always be the same position for all award bios updates in the future?) * patch the to-be-flashed linuxbios image on the fly.
Such a transition is not exactly free of risks.
There might be another solution if we accept that the machine's mac address will change.
We could use 4 fixed bytes and generate the last 4 bytes from /dev/urandom during _build_. This would leave us with a working machine with a reasonable mac address. Then, with above line you prevent that the mac address changes between linuxbios updates.
Stefan