Return-path: Received: from ug-out-1314.google.com ([66.249.92.173]:18825 "EHLO ug-out-1314.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751480AbYG1N4n (ORCPT ); Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:56:43 -0400 Received: by ug-out-1314.google.com with SMTP id h2so31768ugf.16 for ; Mon, 28 Jul 2008 06:56:41 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/6] mac80211: allow no mac address until firmware load From: Luis Carlos Cobo To: Michael Buesch Cc: Johannes Berg , Dan Williams , linux-wireless@vger.kernel.org In-Reply-To: <200807281544.33509.mb@bu3sch.de> References: <48763814.27052c0a.1794.2095@mx.google.com> <1217172136.2700.21.camel@localhost.localdomain> <1217251433.12662.5.camel@johannes.berg> <200807281544.33509.mb@bu3sch.de> Content-Type: text/plain Date: Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:56:37 +0200 Message-Id: <1217253397.6364.2.camel@localhost> (sfid-20080728_155646_607452_FCBC45C2) Mime-Version: 1.0 Sender: linux-wireless-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: 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? -- Luis Carlos Cobo Rus GnuPG ID: 44019B60 cozybit Inc.