In message 47B48CD0.9060600@ovro.caltech.edu you wrote:
I would imagine some designers prefer saving these type of parameters to an EEPROM, independent of the application (bootloader, kernel, filesystem, etc) flash. This would
Most of the designes I've seen so far then decided to use the EEPROM to store the U-Boot environment, because then they didn't need any special code to maintain the MAC addresses in EEPROM. That's avery bad decision, of course.
So, as the designer, its up to you. But keep in mind that you want to make it hard for a customer to screw up, so a separate EEPROM could be a good choice.
In many cases it ain't. I've seen many board which lost their EEPROM contents, typically because of edge condition problems as documented in the file mentioned before - a poor power supply with too slow rise times of the voltages makes an excellent test case. I know of systems where it blows the EEPROM content in 2 out of 3 boot cycles :-(
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk