[U-Boot] How to random my mac in u-boot

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Peter Pan,

In message <48abf2c21002080330k285f07b2y8b55f978a28cd6f8 at mail.gmail.com> you wrote:
> I understand what your mean. But we need to setup the boards' information
> including the MAC address through ethernet. With the same MAC address,
> only one board can be configured at a time, which is not efficient enough.

There are many ways to install a MAC into your hardware -without
hard-conding one into your image code.

> Because of the quantity of the boards comparing with the number of workers,
> we can not set the MAC address by hand. So what I means is to make the

Of course you cannot do that. Keep in mind that you are _required_
(and note that this is not an option, but a mandatory requirement) to
provide a unique (!) MAC address with each piece of your hardware.

> u-boot generate a temporarily random local-administration MAC and get the
> correct information later.

This is one option, but probably not a good one.

How would you then know which board was provided what MAC? Typically
you want to also put a sticker with the printed serial number, MAC
address etc. on your hardware, i. e. there is some interaction with
your production database needed, and you need to know exactly which
board has been assigned which addresses. This prevents using "random"
addresses.

> May I know how other set their boards' MAC address. Is there any trick to
> do this job.

There are many different ways to do that. Just to give you one
example: have a look at board/tqc/tqm8xx/load_sernum_ethaddr.c
In this case, during production (when the software gets installed to
flash), a special information block (containing among other things the
board's unique serial number and MAC address) gets programmed to a
special, otherwise unused location in flash. U-Boot will pick up the
information there and auto-initialize the respective variables.

I don't want to suggest that this is the optimal approach -  but it is
one of the working solutions.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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