[U-Boot-Users] [PATCH] m68k fix for Ethernet Buffers at address 0

[Håvard Skinnemoen]

On 7/13/07, Wolfgang Denk <wd at denx.de> wrote:
> U-Boot shall initialize a device only when it uses it. If Ethernet is
> not used by U-Boot itself, it  shall  not  touch  any  parts  of  the
> Ethernet controller.

Ok, now I'm confused.

When I submitted the macb ethernet driver, which works on both avr32
and at91sam926x devices, for inclusion in the LInux kernel, I was told
to remove the mac address from the platform data. This was because ARM
relied on u-boot initializing the mac address of all ethernet
controllers before booting Linux, so AVR32 should do the same as well.

So I did this and added some code to the avr32 board setup to
initialize the mac address registers as a temporary measure until I
could be sure that u-boot did in fact always set up the mac address on
all interfaces.

Now, it seems like the situation is:
  a) Other architectures rely on mac registers being initialized by
u-boot as well.
  b) This is not how things are supposed to work.

I'd be happy to go back to passing mac addresses through the tagged
list (in fact, u-boot never stopped doing that on avr32) but this
needs to be resolved on ARM before I can change the driver.

Håvard