On Tuesday 08 September 2020 08:35:00 Andre Heider wrote:
The hardware does not provide a MAC address. Enable this so that network access works with just the default environment.
Well, this is not fully truth as MAC address is stored in SPI, just in non-standard format, in U-Boot env stored in env partition and it is hard to use outside of U-Boot, plus easy to erase / overwrite / lost.
I'm not a big fan of this change. This looks like a workaround / hack for boards where MAC address was erased (e.g. by broken U-Boot distro scripts) or for early boards where MAC address was not written at all (as I was told).
And on these boards this patch would cause that U-Boot would see on every boot different MAC address. This would cause another mess in network for U-Boot netboot as DHCP/TFTP server would see for one board every time different MAC address.
Is not really better to instruct user how to fix board where e.g. broken distro scripts erased MAC address? We have already paragraph in README.marvell about it.
Also this change affects "default" defconfig value. And based on above arguments I do not think that this change should be enabled by default.
I understand that for some situations it may be useful (e.g. mass board reparation process via netboot), but as this is config option, users in such situation can enable this option manually.
I think that for default behavior is not provide network access in U-Boot if for some reasons factory permanent MAC address was removed. User can easier and faster detect this issue and fix it.
Signed-off-by: Andre Heider a.heider@gmail.com
configs/mvebu_espressobin-88f3720_defconfig | 1 + 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
diff --git a/configs/mvebu_espressobin-88f3720_defconfig b/configs/mvebu_espressobin-88f3720_defconfig index 7aabbba59f..5e9fcd1f26 100644 --- a/configs/mvebu_espressobin-88f3720_defconfig +++ b/configs/mvebu_espressobin-88f3720_defconfig @@ -84,3 +84,4 @@ CONFIG_USB_ETHER_RTL8152=y CONFIG_USB_ETHER_SMSC95XX=y CONFIG_SHA1=y CONFIG_SHA256=y
+CONFIG_NET_RANDOM_ETHADDR=y
2.28.0