[U-Boot-Users] Proposal for patch to configure networkparameters

[Ulf Samuelsson <ulf@atmel.com>]

>> Could you post a list of configuration parameters that you'd rather not 
>> see in a board
>> header file?  When I created MPC8349ITX.h, I just followed the example of 
>> other 83xx
>> boards.  I defined the network CONFIG_ options, because I thought that a 
>> flash-default
>> setting would be useful.
>
> At least partially it's a matter of taste. I tend to rather make sure
> that a user of the board sees that he must provide  his  own  network
> configuration  by providing no default setting, rather then having to
> deal with nasty network issues because several boards share the  same
> IP or - even worse - MAC addresses.
>
>
> Just use common sense. Anything that is board-specific  should  never
> be  set  in  the  board  config file because that would mean that all
> boards would share this property in the default configuration.
>
> An absolute no-no is CONFIG_ETH*ADDR.
>
> Similar, attempts to define a standard setting for "serial#" are
> seriously broken.
>
> I also consider it bad design to set CONFIG_IPADDR an CONFIG_HOSTNAME
>
>
> Note that you *can* do all these things, if you know exactly what you
> are doing - that's whey the feature is there. But shipping boards  to
> customer  with  all  set  to  the  same  MAC  address is a felony and
> deserves serious punishment (hello Andrea!).

I am not shipping *any* boards to anyone, so I dont have the problem...

If you want to avoid misuse of the feature, you could actually reserve a 
specific
ethaddr for production use in a point to point configuration
and check for this ethaddr when you boot.
If you have this ethaddr, then you will not boot, and will instead print an 
error message...

>
> Ulf was (originally) asking for a customization feature; of course it
> makes sense to customize boards during production, for example to set
> board-specific values for MAC address, serial number, etc.  But  this
> can, and should, be done without creating different U-Boot images.
>

Again, none of these values are BOARD specific.
The board specific values are set using "autoscr"
but you can't tftp down a script without an ethaddr, can you?

Again, very little of the discussion is still about the patch itself.


The reason for the patch , is that I would want to be able to generate some
arbitrary configuration items using scripts (or even by a simple copy)
and I do not want to modify any board.h files to do this.

Is this really a bad thing?



> Best regards,
>
> Wolfgang Denk
>
> -- 


Best Regards
Ulf Samuelsson                ulf at atmel.com
Atmel Nordic AB
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