Re: RFC: Platform data for onboard USB assets

Greg KH
2011-03-11T16:16:53Z

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 04:03:09PM +0000, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 04:54:03PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > On Friday 11 March 2011, Mark Brown wrote:
>
> > > It's arguable if this stuff is broken at all, from a hardware design
> > > point of view it's perfectly reasonable and if you're shipping volumes
> > > in the millions very small savings add up to interesting numbers easily.
>
> > It may be reasonable if you don't expect anyone to connect the
> > device to an ethernet port, but in that case you could save much
> > more by removing the ethernet chip and the socket along with the
> > eeprom.
>
> > Really, any machine without a fixed MAC address is a huge pain
> > for users, just google for "pandaboard mac address" to see
> > how much work this has caused people.
>
> I'm not familiar with the Pandaboard but most of the devices I've worked
> with that do this have unique MAC addresses but they store in other
> locations on the device (typically in flash).
>
> Like I say, it's not just MAC addresses that can need configuring this
> way - it can be other random "you're wired up this way" type
> information that would normally be figured out from the USB IDs.

And all of that should be done in userspace, like all other device
names, I still fail to see what is so different here from any other type
of system.

thanks,

greg k-h