Re: RFC: Platform data for onboard USB assets

Mark Brown
2011-03-11T16:03:12Z

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.