On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 05:02:33PM -0400, Tom Sylla wrote:
On 9/26/07, Robert Millan rmh@aybabtu.com wrote:
unsigned long mac_pos; mac_pos = 0xffffffd0; // refer to romstrap.inc and romstrap.lds mac_l = readl(mac_pos) + nic_index; mac_h = readl(mac_pos + 4);and can't understand what is this romstrap and why it retrieves the MAC from it in runtime. Is this some kind of legacy interface? Wouldn't it be simpler to just hardcode it during build? E.g. see attached patch.
Maybe simpler, but not really correct. What if you have 2 of your boards? With your patch, you have to compile twice. That's not elegant. If you can make just one ROM image, and then automatically change the MAC at a specified location inside of it for each individual motherboard, things work better. (AMI/award/etc do this, when you use their flash utilities, it does not overwrite the MAC so you don't lose it)
Your solution is ok if you want to just support your single board on your desktop, but for anybody trying to make a commercial product with LB, they won't want to be recompiling for each unit shipped.
Agreed. MACs are a bit of a pain (also on the MCP55), and we currently do not have a good way to deal with them. I have MCP55-based LinuxBIOS machines in production that have 00:00:00:00:00:00 as MAC address for each interface, and I need to force the MAC manually in /etc/network/interfaces. Not elegant, and not ideal. The kernel does not like it either, on startup it says 'complain to your bios vendor' ;)
I would like a way to change the MAC address for a rom image with some tool - ideally as an option to flashrom, I guess. Keep in mind that there can be multiple addresses on a board!
Thanks, Ward.