Re: RFC: Platform data for onboard USB assets

Mark Brown
2011-03-11T15:29:43Z

On Fri, Mar 11, 2011 at 01:31:13PM +0100, Arnd Bergmann wrote:

> I understand the problem, but IMHO there really needs to be a better
> solution for this. As far as I understand, the underlying problem is
> that USB ethernet devices with a proper MAC address get a different
> device name from devices with a generated random MAC address, and
> the people that designed this board were trying to save a few cents
> by not allocating a MAC address for the ethernet device [1], right?

> I believe we should fix this particular problem locally, instead of
> coming up with generic infrastructure for broken hardware.

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.

> One relatively easy solution would be to allow passing a MAC address
> to this particular device driver as a module parameter, and generating
> a fixed MAC address in the regular vendor space when installing the
> boot loader. That would also solve the problem that a DHCP server
> currently assigns a new IP address to a panda board at every boot.

There's other uses for this stuff, it seems to be quite common for
various radio related things to end up hanging off USB too.