[U-Boot-Users] ethact, ethprim and NET_MULTI

[Wolfgang Denk]

In message <f608b67d0703090925v1714b02cm78ea07f8a8090ec2 at mail.gmail.com> you wrote:
>
> > Redundancy is useless? Maybe for you. Others pay alot of money for it.
> 
> Hey Wolfgang, let's not get personal here, it's just business :-)

I did not intend to get personal. I just tried to explicate my
position.

> I appreciate your point, *in certain setups* it is quite advantageous
> to be able to try using a different interface.

And I agree that in certain setups it may be not beneficial, but on
the other hand I don't see why it would be harmful there.

> But in some other setups (let's say there is a system with a
> controller with two interfaces - once serving the external port, and
> another one serving the backplane) it is completely pointless to try
> to say tftpboot off any other interface but the external port.

OK. So when does it hurt you? You define ethprime  such  that  U-Boot
will  start  using  the  correct  interface. If you command U-Boot to
perform a network download it will try doing this, using the  correct
interface.  If  your  network  and  your  servers  are  OK, this will
succeed. Fine. If your network connection or your servers  have  some
temporary  glitches,  this  should  be  handled gracefully by U-Boots
retry mechanism. So this situation is handled on, too. Only  if  your
network  connection  and/or  your  servers are inoperative for a long
time then U-Boot will try and switch interfaces, which will not  help
in  your  setup.  But  then  -  what  sort of damage is done? If your
network resp. server did not work for such a long time as the  U-Boot
timeout,  then  chances  that they would start working after this are
not exactly high. Continueing to try loading from  the  non-operative
interface  is  not much better that trying to download from the other
interface which does not work either. So what do you lose?

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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