On 04/10/2017 08:57 AM, Olliver Schinagl wrote:
Hey York,
On 10-04-17 17:52, York Sun wrote:
On 04/10/2017 08:34 AM, Olliver Schinagl wrote:
First off: P.S. Joe, for some reason my previous patches where added with me as: "oliver@schinagl.nl oliver@schinagl.nl" I see that it comes from patchwork as such. Is there some way to fix this to "Olliver Schinagl oliver@schinagl.nl"?
Below the updated summary:
This patch-series introduces methods to retrieve the MAC address from an onboard EEPROM. The series does a few small cleanups at the start, as either I ran into them while doing this series and fixed them along the way or actually depended on them.
A manufacturer wants to produce boards and may even have MAC addresses for boards. Maintaining unique environments on a per-board basis however is horrible. Also this data should be very persistent, and not easily deletable by simply wiping the environment or device tree. Finally there are chips available on the market with a pre-programmed MAC address chips (proms) that a board manufacturer wants to use. Because of this, the MAC needs to be stored be able to read from such an 'external' source.
The current idea of the eeprom layout, is to skip the first 8 bytes, so that other information can be stored there if needed, for example a header with some magic to identify the EEPROM. Or equivalent purposes.
After those 8 bytes the MAC address follows the first macaddress. The macaddress is appended by a CRC8 byte and then padded to make for nice 8 bytes. Following the first macaddress one can store a second, or a third etc etc macaddress.
The CRC8 is optional (via a define) but is strongly recommended to have. It helps preventing user error and more importantly, checks if the bytes read are actually a user inserted address. E.g. only writing 1 macaddress into the eeprom but trying to consume 2.
Interesting solution. We have used EEPROM to store board ID, version number, MAC addresses on many of our boards. We have a command "mac" to read/write these addresses. Would you take a look to see if it is possible to integrate?
I feel bad for not noticing the mac command! I think that this indeed could get integrated, providing generic helpers.
Just wished you would have sent your suggestion during patch v1 or v2 :p
Sorry, for some reason I wasn't CC'ed for your earlier version. They were buried in thousands of emails.
York