Some days ago I decided to send an updated and reworked version of my kernel patch for the smsc95xx kernel module - to get a persistent MAC address via the kernel cmdline from u-boot - to the linux kernel mailing list. I should have known better and save me the time: the patch wasn't accepted. You can follow the discussion here.
If you follow the argumentation, we should drop the support for changing the MAC address of a network device via kernel module parameter also from e.g. the following modules: sunhme, fec or ksz884x. And we should then also remove all the 'generate a random MAC for real devices' since it all could be somehow get managed in the user-space, although it's pita to handle this task in user-space since it's currently even hard to find out if a device got a random MAC assigned from the kernel.
I still plan to add the patch to the openSUSE kernel until I've worked out another solution. Feel free to use the patch anyway on your system.
If you follow the argumentation, we should drop the support for changing the MAC address of a network device via kernel module parameter also from e.g. the following modules: sunhme, fec or ksz884x. And we should then also remove all the 'generate a random MAC for real devices' since it all could be somehow get managed in the user-space, although it's pita to handle this task in user-space since it's currently even hard to find out if a device got a random MAC assigned from the kernel.
I still plan to add the patch to the openSUSE kernel until I've worked out another solution. Feel free to use the patch anyway on your system.