On Friday 09 June 2006 11:56 am, you wrote:
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.
Your right I didn't check the driver, but I checked the data sheets which states that the MAC is loaded upon any reset. If the driver does it it's purely redundancy
You claim things which you obviously never checked. 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.
There is nothing about my statement that is not true.
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.
I stand by my statement. The core system put's it there, regardless of whether the OS reloads it or not. I believe we should do the same.
It is an interesting point however, I was unaware that the drivers are loading the MAC, thank you for pointing it out. Nevertheless, the MAC was already there, this loading is redundant.
NZG.