MAC Address setting as 00:00:00:00:00:00

hi all,
I am working on AT91SAM9260-EK board. Can anyone say me how to set the MAC address even if the ethernet cable is not connected?. What is happening is if the ethernet cable is disconnected during boot up, Mac address is setting as 00:00:00:00:00:00 in LINUX. So is there any way to solve this by making changes in U-Boot code?. Or any changes required in Linux ethernet Driver?.

With Regards,
Tomy Devasia

----- Original Message -----
From: "tomy" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, October 16, 2007 3:01 PM
Subject: [U-Boot-Users] MAC Address setting as 00:00:00:00:00:00

First of all, U-boot does not support the SAM9260.
You need the Atmel prepatched U-Boot for that and this list may not be appropriate for that..
The vanilla Atmel U-Boot is based on 1.1.5.

The preferred method is to pass the MAC address as a boot parameter, and let the
linux kernel do an ifconfig. Any patches which leave the Ethernet initialized
without any network transfers will cause Wolfgang serious indigestion, and will cause a reject message faster than boiled aspargus.

If you download the latest buildroot from buildroot.uclibc.org this will download a prepatched U-Boot which supports an "eth_init" command which waits for the host server to be up an running, before the boot can continue.
This will ensure that the ethernet controller is initialized as a side effect.

This function was needed by a customer, which NFS mounted the root fs. They turned power on, on the PC server and the AT91 at the same time and since the ARM booted much faster than the x86, the boot would always fail, since the NFS file system was not exported at the time needed by the ARM.

The eth_init command will wait until the network on the x86 is running, before
the ARM can boot, and this means that the NFS mount can succeed.

Best Regards
Ulf Samuelsson