From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756842Ab2APVGL (ORCPT ); Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:06:11 -0500 Received: from g4t0014.houston.hp.com ([15.201.24.17]:42327 "EHLO g4t0014.houston.hp.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1754889Ab2APVGJ (ORCPT ); Mon, 16 Jan 2012 16:06:09 -0500 Message-ID: <4F14913D.6090404@hp.com> Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:06:05 -0800 From: Rick Jones User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.24) Gecko/20111109 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.16 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: David Laight CC: Arjan van de Ven , 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: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On 01/16/2012 08:20 AM, David Laight wrote: > 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. > > For a long time sun solaris systems used the same MAC > address (based on the system id) on all their ethernet > interfaces. And there was a perhaps small, but certainly non-trivial stream of people asking how to change that because their system(s) were indeed multiple ports connected to the same broadcast domain. Long since then Sun changed their defaults, and we've gotten things like bonding, so I think any assumption that a system with multiple ports will not have then connected to the same broadcast domain is brittle at best. rick jones