From: Michael Buesch <mb@bu3sch.de>
To: Luis Carlos Cobo <luisca@cozybit.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/6] mac80211: allow no mac address until firmware load
Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:00:38 +0200
Cc: Johannes Berg <johannes@sipsolutions.net>,
	Dan Williams <dcbw@redhat.com>, linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org
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On Monday 28 July 2008 15:56:37 Luis Carlos Cobo wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-07-28 at 15:44 +0200, Michael Buesch wrote:
> > Well, I think that really is pretty weird and it is confusing to the
> > user to see that pseudo random MAC that changes suddenly when the device is
> > initialized. For the human user (so everybody but me), it would be better
> > to have the MAC all-zeros until the firmware loaded. So it would be obvious
> > that the MAC is not set, yet. I think userspace
> 
> The problem is that all-zeroes is actually a valid mac address, owned by
> Xerox (http://standards.ieee.org/regauth/oui/oui.txt) Not that it will
> probably cause us any problem, but a multicast address is afaik an
> invalid mac for a device. Should we go for 01:allzeros?

If that's really a problem, yes. 01:00:00:00:00:00 is still better
than a pseudo random MAC, IMO. It's immediately obvious to the user
that the MAC currently is not set.

-- 
Greetings Michael.