[PATCH] defconfig: espressobin: enable NET_RANDOM_ETHADDR

Pali Rohár pali at kernel.org
Tue Sep 8 09:42:59 CEST 2020


On Tuesday 08 September 2020 08:35:00 Andre Heider wrote:
> The hardware does not provide a MAC address. Enable this so that
> network access works with just the default environment.

Well, this is not fully truth as MAC address is stored in SPI, just in
non-standard format, in U-Boot env stored in env partition and it is
hard to use outside of U-Boot, plus easy to erase / overwrite / lost.

I'm not a big fan of this change. This looks like a workaround / hack
for boards where MAC address was erased (e.g. by broken U-Boot distro
scripts) or for early boards where MAC address was not written at all
(as I was told).

And on these boards this patch would cause that U-Boot would see on
every boot different MAC address. This would cause another mess in
network for U-Boot netboot as DHCP/TFTP server would see for one board
every time different MAC address.

Is not really better to instruct user how to fix board where e.g. broken
distro scripts erased MAC address? We have already paragraph in
README.marvell about it.

Also this change affects "default" defconfig value. And based on above
arguments I do not think that this change should be enabled by default.

I understand that for some situations it may be useful (e.g. mass board
reparation process via netboot), but as this is config option, users in
such situation can enable this option manually.

I think that for default behavior is not provide network access in
U-Boot if for some reasons factory permanent MAC address was removed.
User can easier and faster detect this issue and fix it.

> Signed-off-by: Andre Heider <a.heider at gmail.com>
> ---
>  configs/mvebu_espressobin-88f3720_defconfig | 1 +
>  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
> 
> diff --git a/configs/mvebu_espressobin-88f3720_defconfig b/configs/mvebu_espressobin-88f3720_defconfig
> index 7aabbba59f..5e9fcd1f26 100644
> --- a/configs/mvebu_espressobin-88f3720_defconfig
> +++ b/configs/mvebu_espressobin-88f3720_defconfig
> @@ -84,3 +84,4 @@ CONFIG_USB_ETHER_RTL8152=y
>  CONFIG_USB_ETHER_SMSC95XX=y
>  CONFIG_SHA1=y
>  CONFIG_SHA256=y
> +CONFIG_NET_RANDOM_ETHADDR=y
> -- 
> 2.28.0
> 


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