Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:35:12 +0000 | Subject | Re: [PATCH] r8169: Randomise invalid MAC addresses | From | "Torne (Richard Coles)" <> |
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On 23 January 2012 20:53, Paul Gortmaker <paul.gortmaker@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 1:32 PM, Torne (Richard Coles) <torne@google.com> wrote: >> From: "Torne (Richard Coles)" <torne@google.com> >> >> If the default MAC address stored in the card is invalid, replace it >> with a random address and complain about it. > > You might want to have a look at this thread and its outcome. > > https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/1/14/75
While I can appreciate the argument that people shouldn't build hardware that relies on this kind of behaviour, I am in the same situation as Darren there: I have a retail device I have bought that has a garbage MAC address (an OpenPeak Joggler), and so do all the others. Requiring that this be worked around in userspace makes it tricky to just install a standard Linux distribution onto this piece of hardware that's otherwise pretty much x86-pc-compatible (albeit with a weird bootloader)
The vendor's distribution clones the USB wifi adapter's MAC onto the ethernet device in userspace at boot, which is rather unpleasant (it never uses both interfaces at once, admittedly).
So, is this just not going to be acceptable in any form? What about refactoring the existing drivers that do this so that this code doesn't need to be repeated in every driver, if that would help? I'd really quite like to get standard linux distros to be compatible with the Joggler, and this is one of the few changes that's actually needed (one way or another).
-- Torne (Richard Coles) torne@google.com
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