On 28-11-16 10:13, Igor Grinberg wrote:
Hi Olliver,
On 11/25/16 17:30, Olliver Schinagl wrote:
[...]
The current idea of the eeprom layout, is to skip the first 8 bytes, so that other information can be stored there if needed, for example a header with some magic to identify the EEPROM. Or equivalent purposes.
After those 8 bytes the MAC address follows the first macaddress. The macaddress is appended by a CRC8 byte and then padded to make for nice 8 bytes. Following the first macaddress one can store a second, or a third etc etc mac address.
The CRC8 is optional (via a define) but is strongly recommended to have. It helps preventing user error and more importantly, checks if the bytes read are actually a user inserted address. E.g. only writing 1 macaddress into the eeprom but trying to consume 2.
While reading the above, I'm wondering, have you considered the eeprom layout feature that we have in: common/eeprom/... ?
Last year, when starting this patch series, this did not really exist in so far (iirc).
The layout feature was actually designed for these tasks, but in a more generic way then just Ethernet MAC address.
I did see it and I was quite excited. I think a follow up patch should switch over. I did not yet use the new eeprom layout thing as I am hoping for Maxime's patches to land first, where he makes the whole eeprom interfacing more generic.
What do you think?
I'll have to look at the eeprom layout feature a little more in depth, the one thing that was a little 'annoying' (from a short quick glance) was that the layout was jumping around a bit (eth0, eth1, something else, eth2, eth3). But yes, I was quite intrigued herein.
Olliver