Hi Ben,
Hold on a second. This patch is wrong. As Mike has pointed out, the net library already gets the MAC address from the environment. The correct flow is:
- Read from hardware in initialize() function
- Read from environment in net/eth.c after initialize()
- Give priority to the value in the environment if a conflict
- Program hardware in the device's init() function.
If somebody wants to subvert the 'design philosophy', the right way is to call eth_dev->init() in board code.
This would mean that for the real problem of a missing mac address, the device then is initialized completely adding the autonegotation timeout to every bootup sequence, correct?
If it is, then it doesn't solve my problem in an acceptable way. On the other hand a different route occured to Wolfgang and me in a lengthy discussion. This will need a little broader interpretation of the design guidelines, but as I still cannot see any downside to this and it will also fix some inconsistent behaviour _that we currently have_ ("setenv ethaddr ...", do not do any network transfer and boot linux), I want to follow this route.
I will try to implement this in form of a patch in order to keep the discussion close to the effects on the code base.
Cheers Detlev