[U-Boot] Commit ecee9... (Program net device MAC addresses after initializing) breakage

[Graeme Russ]

Hi All,

I finally got a few spare hours to do some U-Boot hacking and to my dismay
found the build for my board (eNET) had broken. It builds OK, but crashed
during Ethernet initialisation. I tried winding back to a last known good
commit without much luck.

I realised I had upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10 lately, and thought maybe a
tool-chain change was the culprit (was running gcc-4.4.1 and binutils 2.19
from source, now running Ubuntu gcc 4.4.5 and Binutils 2.20)

But, I think that commit ecee9324d73555e744593f3e0d387bec4c566f55 may be
'not quite right'. My board uses the rtl8139 driver, and the following
patch gets my board booting again:

diff --git a/drivers/net/rtl8139.c b/drivers/net/rtl8139.c
index db8a727..3646148 100644
--- a/drivers/net/rtl8139.c
+++ b/drivers/net/rtl8139.c
@@ -229,6 +229,7 @@ int rtl8139_initialize(bd_t *bis)
                dev->halt = rtl_disable;
                dev->send = rtl_transmit;
                dev->recv = rtl_poll;
+               dev->write_hwaddr = NULL;
 #ifdef CONFIG_MCAST_TFTP
                dev->mcast = rtl_bcast_addr;
 #endif

Just before this code we see that dev is malloc'd:

dev = (struct eth_device *)malloc(sizeof *dev);

So there is no guarantee that dev is NULL'd.

Has anyone else run into similar problems?

I saw discussion a little while ago regarding implementing a version of
malloc that returns cleared memory - did this gain any traction?

Regards,

Graeme