From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Don Fry Subject: Re: Ethernet MAC address question Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 08:38:19 -0700 (PDT) Sender: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com Message-ID: <200406151538.i5FFcJ720553@localhost.localdomain> References: <20040615095817.GA16523@projectcolo.org.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: netdev@oss.sgi.com Return-path: To: broonie@sirena.org.uk (Mark Brown) In-Reply-To: <20040615095817.GA16523@projectcolo.org.uk> from "Mark Brown" at Jun 15, 2004 10:58:17 AM Errors-to: netdev-bounce@oss.sgi.com List-Id: netdev.vger.kernel.org So how does the driver distinguish between a valid, but incorrect MAC address, and the 'correct' MAC address? The incorrect one that is the value that just happened to be in the uninitialized volatile registers, and the correct address which some magic platform means loaded into the same, but this time initialized, volatile registers. > > However there are a few cases where some magic platform means loads the > > MAC address into the (volatile) MAC address registers, and that's the > > only source of an accurate MAC address for those people. > > This is reasonably common on embedded systems - often there won't be > SEPROMs for individual devices and the MAC address will be stored in > flash or similar and read by the bootloader. > -- Don Fry brazilnut@us.ibm.com