Wolfgang,
what happens if all interfaces are failing - does it come back to ethprime after trying them all and stops or does it keep trying until stopped by the operator with an arbitrary interface as the current one?
That seemed to have happened to me: I tried using an interface, it did not work, I went to see what happened, turned out the hub was down, but after I brought the hub back online the thing still didn't work - why - another interface became "current"!
Also, in some situations it is harmful to expose internal IP addresses on an external network - but u-boot would never have a second though about it :-)
cheers, vadim
On 3/9/07, Wolfgang Denk wd@denx.de wrote:
In message f608b67d0703090925v1714b02cm78ea07f8a8090ec2@mail.gmail.com you wrote:
Redundancy is useless? Maybe for you. Others pay alot of money for it.
Hey Wolfgang, let's not get personal here, it's just business :-)
I did not intend to get personal. I just tried to explicate my position.
I appreciate your point, *in certain setups* it is quite advantageous to be able to try using a different interface.
And I agree that in certain setups it may be not beneficial, but on the other hand I don't see why it would be harmful there.
But in some other setups (let's say there is a system with a controller with two interfaces - once serving the external port, and another one serving the backplane) it is completely pointless to try to say tftpboot off any other interface but the external port.
OK. So when does it hurt you? You define ethprime such that U-Boot will start using the correct interface. If you command U-Boot to perform a network download it will try doing this, using the correct interface. If your network and your servers are OK, this will succeed. Fine. If your network connection or your servers have some temporary glitches, this should be handled gracefully by U-Boots retry mechanism. So this situation is handled on, too. Only if your network connection and/or your servers are inoperative for a long time then U-Boot will try and switch interfaces, which will not help in your setup. But then - what sort of damage is done? If your network resp. server did not work for such a long time as the U-Boot timeout, then chances that they would start working after this are not exactly high. Continueing to try loading from the non-operative interface is not much better that trying to download from the other interface which does not work either. So what do you lose?
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk
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