Re: RFC: Platform data for onboard USB assets

Arnd Bergmann
2011-03-11T15:54:17Z

On Friday 11 March 2011, Mark Brown wrote:
> 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.

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.

Arnd