mac-address vs. local-mac-address

[Kumar Gala]

On Feb 7, 2007, at 3:32 PM, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:

> On Wed, 2007-02-07 at 15:17 -0600, Timur Tabi wrote:
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> What is the current consensus on using mac-address vs. local-mac- 
>> address in the
>> device tree?  The 1275 spec says this:
>>
>> "local-mac-address" Standard property name to specify preassigned  
>> network address.
>> "mac-address" Standard property name to specify network address  
>> last used.
>>
>> I think we need to agree on some interpretation of these  
>> statements, and all the
>> code should be updated to implement that interpretation.
>
> It's fairly clear:
>
> local-mac-address is what is statically set by the firwmare (comes  
> from
> EEPROM, whatever).
>
> mac-address is really only meaningful if your firmware is
> "dynamic" (real OF, uboot maybe) and was, for some reason,  
> instructed by
> the user to use a different mac address for that boot (if that feature
> exist).
>
> It's basically the mac-address that was actually used on that  
> interface
> to netboot the kernel I'd say.

Which means the code in fsl_soc.c is wrong in how it handles the  
precedence of gianfar:

                 mac_addr = get_property(np, "local-mac-address", NULL);
                 if (mac_addr == NULL)
                         mac_addr = get_property(np, "mac-address",  
NULL);
                 if (mac_addr == NULL) {
                         /* Obsolete */
                         mac_addr = get_property(np, "address", NULL);
                 }

should really be:

                 mac_addr = get_property(np, "mac-address", NULL);
                 if (mac_addr == NULL)
                         mac_addr = get_property(np, "local-mac- 
address", NULL);
                 if (mac_addr == NULL) {
                         /* Obsolete */
                         mac_addr = get_property(np, "address", NULL);
                 }

- k