Hi Marius,
On Tue, Jan 28, 2003 at 05:45:35PM +0100, Marius Groeger wrote:
As usual, it depends. On PPCs for example, the bd_info structure is passed into the kernel, and drivers can access the MAC address from there. The right way to do it on ARM would probably be to define a corresponding tag.
Hmm. That's not very generic, which means that the drivers have to be architecture dependend as well, and that's bad.
There are also patches to access the U-Boot environment right in the flash using MTD.
In my case the environment is in a serial EEPROM. I've seen a patch from Bernhard Kuhn who has implemented a bootenv userspace command (also for flash). Looks saner to me, although this means that one wouldn't have the MAC address available if the kernel tried to make a dhcp request during IP autoconfiguration. But as the whole in-kernel autoconfig stuff seems to go away with the approach of early user space as well it might be an idea to do all that stuff from user space.
Anyway, thanks for the ideas.
Robert