Re: [PATCH] Yellowfin bug fix for Symbios cards

[Val Henson]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2001 at 12:26:23AM -0400, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Val Henson wrote:
> > Hm, good point.  I should figure out why read_eeprom isn't working and
> > fix that instead.  Maybe the driver should be changed to attempt to
> > read the MAC from the eeprom and then read from the registers if that
> > fails, instead of relying on flags.
> 
> Yeah.  There is at least one other driver (pcnet32?) that does something
> like this...
> 
> probe:
> 	dev->dev_addr[] = read_eeprom();
> 	if (!is_valid_ether_addr(dev->dev_addr))
> 		{ read from card registers }

Well, I asked our hardware engineers, and the reason read the MAC
address from the EEPROM is that we don't have an EEPROM on our
boards.  Instead, the bootloader reads some stuff out of NVRAM and
writes it into the MAC address registers of the ethernet chip.

I think the above scheme is a good way to read the MAC, but I'd want
to test it on an actual Yellowfin gigabit card before submitting it.
Anyone out here willing to test?

-VAL