Saturday, February 04, 2012

Update: PandaBoard persistent MAC from smsc95xx kernel module

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.