In message 200606090923.18523.ngustavson@emacinc.com you wrote:
On Friday 09 June 2006 2:44 am, Wolfgang Denk wrote:
You obviously know these things better than me, so I better shut up.
I've got some hardware experience but you certainly are far more experienced with bootloaders than me.
Maybe not only bootloaders.
You claim things which you obviously never checked.
For example, you wrote:
It's a common practice among ethernet controllers, such as the Realtek 8139 and the Intel 82559 to have the MAC address automatically load from the EEPROM upon reset with no intervention from any sort of driver.
You obviouly never bothered to spend a thought on *who* reads the MAC address from EEPROM on such systems? These cards don't have any on-board BIOS or so which would do this.
You never bothered to check for example "drivers/rtl8139.c" in the U-Boot sources or "drivers/net/8139*.c" in the Linux kernel tree.
You never bothered to check for example "drivers/eepro100.c" in the U-Boot sources or "drivers/net/e100.c" in the Linux kernel tree.
Otherwise you should have discovered the e100_eeprom_read() resp. read_eeprom() functions in these drivers which do - guess what? - read the MAC address from EEPROM.
The cards you used as example actually *do* have code in their drivers to read the MAC address from the EEPROM and program it into the controller. You see?
But you write:
There isn't really anything incorrect about expecting the MAC to be valid upon loading the OS,It's typical of the industry.
Maybe you should go and read a bit of driver code from some operating systems, before claiming to know what these do or don't do.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk