Re: NVIDIA Ethernet & invalid MAC

[Chuck Ebbert <cebbert@redhat.com>]

On 10/16/2007 10:43 AM, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Oct 2007 18:10:53 +0400
> Konstantin Kalin <konstantin.kalin@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Hello,
>>
>> Recently we've got some computers with new motherboard having NVidia 
>> chipset. The motherboard has nforce12 & nforce13 Ethernet cards. I've 
>> noticed that MAC address is setup random each boot. I debugged the 
>> driver and found that these cards have right-byte order of MAC address 
>> but the driver is expecting incorrect byte-order for these models.
> 
> The only obvious thing I can think of to try would be to read the MAC
> address both ways around.
> 
> The first 3 bytes of the resulting MAC should always be the Nvidia
> allocation as I understand it and if so you can then decide which way
> around is correct. 
> 
> ie if it starts 00:04:0B then you know which way around it goes. (there
> is one address that is the same either way around but clearly that one
> doesn't matter).
> 
> So perhaps do that and for the afflicted parts add an EITHER_WAY_AROUND
> flag ?
> 

See the below for another report of this:

http://marc.info/?t=119215716900001&r=1&w=2

And apparently some motherboard vendors have their own allocations for ethernet
addresses?