In message 1177306991.4872.25.camel@elrond.sweden.atmel.com you wrote:
Since U-Boot does have a enviroment area. the natural place to put compile time initialization is in the environment area and compile the environment as a separate entity which is linked to the environment. You can define a sector in the <board>.lds. It will not handle "reset to factory defaults" though.
Then you can have compile time initialization AND if you so choose, you could during production decide to first program u-boot into the flash, and then afterwards modify the environment. On a dataflash that is easy, since the minimium erase block is 1056 bytes and you have several blocks in the environment area.
It's good that we have an agreement here. This is exactly what I proposed to you a couple of times before.
Doing it this way, still require you to *create* the environment data Until there is a configuration method which allows your grandmother to get networking running my proposed patch is still useful.
I cannot follow this conclusion, though.
My goal is to make it easier for the user, and I hopefully will at a later stage will have a small application which will generate a board specific script which can be installed on the production PC and run once per board.
Currently the ethernet address is already set by u-boot. It is set to 00:00:00:00:00:00, making it impossible to communicate over ethernet.
This is making it difficult to the user. I guess each board has a real MAC address, so why don't you use this one? [Also, IMO not setting the MAC address at all is still better than setting it to a non-working value.]
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk