In message 200505251312.29064.ngustavson@emacinc.com you wrote:
That's a good idea, but doesn't work for us because we distribute the boards with valid MAC's in the enviornment, hence every one must be different, and gets hand programmed.
There are solutions for this, too.
I don't know that there's a way to get around this, but if someone has come up with a tool, I would love to get my hands on it!
See "board/tqm8xx/load_sernum_ethaddr.c" - on these boards the unused space at the end of the last U-Boot flash sector is used: we store some data structure in the last 64 bytes of this sector containing the serial number, MAC address and som configuration information of the board. These 64 bytes are programmed after all the software has been installed, right before testing the boards.
U-Boot will check if the envrionment variables "serial#" and "ethaddr" are already defined - if this is the case, nothing happens; if not they get auto-initialized from this data structure. This is completely transparent to the user.
You see, all these problems were already addressed somewhere :-)
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk