Problems with DHCP on the Pi

I’m not aware that the OMAP3 or OMAP4 have anything like a MAC address, or even a unique ID that could be used to seed one either, so they’re stuck with a random MAC address – unless anyone knows better?

OMAPs have a nice 128bit unique ID which can be hashed down to a MAC address if necessary. In fact EtherUSB already has code to generate a MAC from the (64bit) unique ID returned by OS_ReadSysInfo 2 (See net_default_mac in net.c). I’m not sure why that code isn’t being used for the SMSC driver.

I haven’t checked what Linux does for the MAC address on OMAP; perhaps it gets passed through from u-boot as one of the command line args, which is something we could also support if necessary.

Why can the MAC not set on the same way as on the BeaglexM and Panda? Sorry I don’t read all posts and my Pi is on the way (I hope).

EtherUSB configures the MAC the same way for all SMSC devices. It either uses the EtherUSB$MAC_Configured system variable, or a hard-coded default MAC. But with EtherUSB in ROM, there’s no easy way of stopping the hard-coded MAC from being used, which isn’t ideal.

On Beagle it works if you setting the MAC and reinit EtherUSB in Predesk before SetUpNet ist working.
Has anyone test this on Pi?

I haven’t checked what Linux does for the MAC address on OMAP; perhaps it gets passed through from u-boot as one of the command line args, which is something we could also support if necessary.

Following an earlier discussion I rebooted a beagle-xm several times on an Angstrom build and noted the MAC each time. Each boot produced a different MAC so it is either truly random or maybe date/time seeded.
Following that I started reading details of the u-boot command and did the obvious boot with serial cable attached and wander the command menu.
u-boot offers a means of setting the MAC to pass upward to the OS, I presume the boot system in the Pi offers something similar.
If people are using a recent u-boot the config is a simple text file “uenv.txt” rather than a file requiring special utilities for its build so saving back a specific config item should be simple.