Quad ethernet card on AXi starts with identical MAC addresses on 5.2.1R

[Ken Smith]

On Mon, Jul 19, 2004 at 07:02:38PM +0200, Ronald Kuehn wrote:
> On Monday, July 19, 2004 at 18:50:55 CEST, Frank Nobis wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > since I have my Sparc for a few days now and could take my hands on a 
> > 4-port ethernet card I have seen that there is something not as I 
> > expected it to behave.
> > 
> > My 4-port card gets detected and I can use it, but it shows on all 
> > interfaces the same MAC address. Output from boot is appended for 
> > conviniance. I just got around that with manually assigning unique MACs 
> > to all interfaces.
> > 
> > I am just wondering if that behavior is as intended.
> 
> Yes, unless you set local-mac-address? to true in OBP.
> 

I would be interested in knowing if this works.  I know it works on
SUN's running Solaris when it is possible but I just checked the
FreeBSD code and unless I made a wrong turn somewhere (which is
possible... :-) it won't matter if this is set or not.  The pathway
I followed seemed to dig the MAC address out of the ID-PROM no matter
what.  In particular hme_pci_attach() seems to call OF_getetheraddr()
which in turn seems to blindly dig the MAC address out of the idprom.

If I recall correctly only some of the HME interfaces were designed
to have their own MAC address so supporting this was touch-and-go
even on Solaris.  The idea of having one MAC address per machine
no matter how many interfaces it has had merit in the old days
but it really screwed things up when they invented VLAN-able switches...

-- 
						Ken Smith
- From there to here, from here to      |       kensmith at cse.buffalo.edu
  there, funny things are everywhere.   |
                      - Theodore Geisel |