Izumi Tsutsui wrote: On 02.12.12 00:40:44 you wrote:
>> I found out that NetBSD's re(4) driver is reading the MAC from EEPROM >> while PPCBoot and Linux are reading it from the chip's ID-registers >> (RTK_IDRn). >> >> What is correct? This is a Realtek 8169S: > > Probably it's defined by hardware vendors, not chip. > > The old RTL8139 (RTL8169 has compat mode) seems to read MAC address > from EEPROM and those values are stored into RTK_IDRn registers. Who writes it into the IDRn registers? The firmware? The driver? Or the chip itself? When the chip does that automatically, then re(4) should depend on RTK_IDRn and not on the EEPROM. > I guess some NAS vendors overwrite RTK_IDn registers by firmware > to avoid extra EEPROM configurations during production. You may be right. I found a modification in the PPCBoot source, which reads the environment variable "ethaddr" and copies it to RTK_IDRn. But the EEPROM seems to have a valid contents (only the last three bytes differ) and I wonder why it is not used. > We can change values per hardware by adding device properties > (prop_dictionary(3)) calls (like sys/dev/pci/if_wm.c etc). Yes. I added a mac-address property to sk(4) myself, some time ago. But re(4) doesn't support it yet. -- Frank Wille
