[PATCH] powerpc: fix MAC address entries for 83xx, 85xx, and 86xx device trees
Timur Tabi
timur at freescale.com
Tue Jun 26 02:01:41 EST 2007
Segher Boessenkool wrote:
> Yup, they're both marked for removal so let's just remove them
> at the same time.
As soon as Paul creates a "for-2.6.25" branch, that's when I was planning on doing it.
> Does the kernel provide a warning to users of too-old firmware^Wuboot
> telling them to update btw?
Nope. The current U-Boot code updates mac-address and/or local-mac-address, whichever
ones exist. If neither exists, it doesn't do anything. If both exists, it updates both
with the same value. This makes it DTS-agnostic, so to speak.
The kernel looks at each of the properties and uses the first one that has a valid MAC
address. Again, this is U-Boot- and DTS-agnostic.
Some older U-Boots would panic if the property it looks for didn't exist. Some Linux
drivers would simply not find a MAC address and then fail to load.
In other words, the current U-Boot and Linux code is written to not care what the other
one does. I have no plans to remove the code in the kernel that looks for obsolete
entries (I'm talking about function of_get_mac_address), because it's "safe".
However, now that you mention it, I could update function of_get_mac_address() to display
a warning if it only finds the 'address' property. That property is definitely wrong and
should never be in the DTS or any device tree passed to the kernel.
--
Timur Tabi
Linux Kernel Developer @ Freescale
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