From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1755552Ab2APQfQ (ORCPT ); Mon, 16 Jan 2012 11:35:16 -0500 Received: from mga01.intel.com ([192.55.52.88]:38120 "EHLO mga01.intel.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1754031Ab2APQfO (ORCPT ); Mon, 16 Jan 2012 11:35:14 -0500 X-ExtLoop1: 1 X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.71,315,1320652800"; d="scan'208";a="107619365" Message-ID: <4F1451BD.9030904@linux.intel.com> Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2012 08:35:09 -0800 From: Arjan van de Ven User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:8.0) Gecko/20111105 Thunderbird/8.0 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: David Laight CC: Darren Hart , Alan Cox , Tomoya MORINAGA , Alan Cox , David Miller , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, jeffrey.t.kirsher@intel.com, paul.gortmaker@windriver.com, jdmason@kudzu.us, netdev@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [PATCH] pch_gbe: Use a randomly generated MAC instead of failing probe References: In-Reply-To: X-Enigmail-Version: 1.3.4 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On 1/16/2012 8:20 AM, David Laight wrote: > >> the tricky thing with embedded hw like this is that all devices might >> end up with the same, read-only filesystem, so storing the >> mac on the FS >> and then loading it from there into the HW is... suboptimal. >> >> Would be very nice if busybox had a command that would check the mac >> from each IF, and created the random mac from userspace >> automatically... > > Since multiple interfaces on a single system are unlikely > to be connected to the same LAN segment, it doesn't really > matter if they use same MAC address. I think you missed the point. All embedded devices have the same fs, so if you have 2 boxes of the same model/brand on the same network, they'd have the same MAC. That's generally frowned upon by network administrators ;-)