In message 367ED8C46538D7119DAC000A0D106744520D57@elmegmbh.elmedmn.com you wrote:
There is an interesting thread about initializing the mac adress:
...
And the King (Russell, that is :-) spoke:
That's a buggy driver then - drivers are supposed to reload the ether address into the chip on open() - if they don't, they're buggy.
and:
Basically, the driver is supposed to read the MAC address at startup. On ->open, it is supposed to reprogram the MAC address back into the chip (but not the EEPROM, if any) whether or not it has been changed.
[Mind: this is about the _Linux_ drivers.]
This is what I've been telling you all the time: a Linux driver shall not make any assumptions about any initialization being done (or not done) by a boot loader; instead, it is responsible to perform all required initialization himself. So if you need to set a MAC address for successful operation of the ethernet interface, then the Linux ethernet driver MUST set the MAC address. Otherwise it is broken and needs fixing.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk