[U-Boot] [PATCH] ne2000: take MAC address from config if available

[Daniel Mack <daniel@caiaq.de>]

Picking up an acient thread,

On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 12:39:10PM +0100, Daniel Mack wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 12:12:24PM +0100, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
> > > This adds CONFIG_NE2000_NOPROM. If set, the ethernet MAC address is taken
> > > from the environment variable 'ethaddr' and the NIC is configured
> > > accordingly. Needed for boards that don't have an EEPROM to store this
> > > setting permanently.
> > > 
> > > Signed-off-by: Daniel Mack <daniel@caiaq.de>
> > > 
> > > ---
> > >  ne2000_base.c |   38 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++----------
> > >   1 file changed, 28 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)
> > 
> > Why do we need a special CONFIG_ option? is it not possible to detect
> > (by software) that there is no EEPROM available, and auto-adjust?
> 
> Hmm, what's bad about a special config variable? I agree that in
> general, auto-probing is a good thing, but in U-Boot with its per-board
> configuration file concept, I don't see much advantage. It is very
> unlikely that a certain board is produced with and without an EEPROM.
> 
> > Note that there is existing policy how to handle the  situation  that
> > we have both a MAC address stored in some other storeage (like EEPROM
> > on  the  NIC)  and  in  the  "ethaddr"  environment variable (see for
> > example drivers/net/cs8900.c). In the end, the code shall always only
> > rely on the U-Boot environment settings.
> 
> I can send a new version of this patch following this, but I wonder
> why such a logic has to be implemented in the ethernet drivers and did
> not find a well-defined place in some kind of layer all drivers make use
> of? Wouldn't it make more sense to put some effort in this direction?

Is there any reason why there was no reply to this anymore suddenly? Did
it sound like too much work for anyone to do it the right way? I'll get
back to this project soon and will need to address the same problems
agains like many weeks ago, and unfortunately, nothing happened to all
the issues I pointed out back then, not a single patch I sent in has been
taken.

Daniel