[LinuxBIOS] retrieving MAC from romstrap

Ward Vandewege ward at gnu.org
Wed Sep 26 23:07:45 CEST 2007


On Wed, Sep 26, 2007 at 05:02:33PM -0400, Tom Sylla wrote:
> On 9/26/07, Robert Millan <rmh at aybabtu.com> wrote:
> >                 unsigned long mac_pos;
> >                 mac_pos = 0xffffffd0; // refer to romstrap.inc and romstrap.lds
> >                 mac_l = readl(mac_pos) + nic_index;
> >                 mac_h = readl(mac_pos + 4);
> >
> > and can't understand what is this romstrap and why it retrieves the MAC from
> > it in runtime.  Is this some kind of legacy interface?  Wouldn't it be simpler
> > to just hardcode it during build?  E.g. see attached patch.
> 
> Maybe simpler, but not really correct. What if you have 2 of your
> boards? With your patch, you have to compile twice. That's not
> elegant. If you can make just one ROM image, and then automatically
> change the MAC at a specified location inside of it for each
> individual motherboard, things work better. (AMI/award/etc do this,
> when you use their flash utilities, it does not overwrite the MAC so
> you don't lose it)
> 
> Your solution is ok if you want to just support your single board on
> your desktop, but for anybody trying to make a commercial product with
> LB, they won't want to be recompiling for each unit shipped.

Agreed. MACs are a bit of a pain (also on the MCP55), and we currently do not
have a good way to deal with them. I have MCP55-based LinuxBIOS machines in
production that have 00:00:00:00:00:00 as MAC address for each interface, and
I need to force the MAC manually in /etc/network/interfaces. Not elegant, and
not ideal. The kernel does not like it either, on startup it says 'complain
to your bios vendor' ;)

I would like a way to change the MAC address for a rom image with some tool -
ideally as an option to flashrom, I guess. Keep in mind that there can be
multiple addresses on a board!

Thanks,
Ward.

-- 
Ward Vandewege <ward at fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation - Senior System Administrator




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