[re-adding mailing lists to Cc]
On Mon, 29 Oct 2007 11:21:25 +0100 "Ulf Samuelsson" ulf@atmel.com wrote:
Haavard, For production use, you want to be able to set up a default address.
I don't think this is necessary in our production setup at least.
All production PCs would have a dedicated Ethernet board, with a predetemined IP address. Nothing but the production PC and the board under production is connected to this Ethernet. Thus there is not a problem to have a fixed ethernet address on the AVR32 board.
If you want this, feel free to patch it back into your production images. But as soon as someone erases the pre-programmed environment on two or more boards, you'll have chaos on the network they're connected to.
Not if you do the check I propose at the end.
Btw, why don't you just pre-program a default environment sector right after you program the u-boot image? That way, you can have all the custom settings you want.
It is easier to do it inside U-boot, than outside U-boot. It is easier to download one file, instead of downloading two files. The effect is the same. If you happen to change the address of the Environment in U-Boot you need a mechanism to check that this is taken care of..
Also: I am not proposing a "default" address just that the user can, by running a command, set the ethaddr to something which is useful for production. If the user does not run the command, then the address will remain unset. Once the ethaddr is set to a different value, it should, as usual, not be possible to change it.
This way you can define a bootcmd which downloads an Autoscript which in its turn programs the linux kernel and the address. When everything is finished, then the etherent address should be programmed with its real value.
So you need to define other environment variables anyway? Why can't you patch in a default ethernet address at the same time?
Because I want to download the setting over Ethernet, and I cannot get access to the "serverip", without an Ethernet address.
To avoid problems, the linux kernel should not be bootable if the kernel address is this "special" address.
No way. I'm not adding bogus special-casing in the Linux kernel to cope with a problem I'm not even sure exists. Besides, you don't have to boot the kernel to experience problems; running "dhcp" from u-boot is enough to wreak havoc on the network.
This would be an U-Boot check.
If the Ethernet address is the predefined ethernet address then the bootm command will give an error message.
We've tried using a default ethernet address on both STK1000 and NGW100 for a while now, and it causes a lot more problems than it solves. I'm turning it off unless someone can point to a specific, valid use-case that breaks.
Best Regards Ulf Samuelsson