[LinuxBIOS] m57sli-s4 build tutorial

Stefan Reinauer stepan at coresystems.de
Mon Mar 19 23:58:09 CET 2007


* Peter Stuge <stuge-linuxbios at cdy.org> [070319 23:59]:
> > it just ignores the 16 bytes at ffffffd0
> 
> Ok, sorry if I'm daft, but how does the MAC address end up in the
> LinuxBIOS rom file?

> Or, aha, did you mean "This is only for the case that a factory image
> was previously flashed." instead of the other way around?

No, it does not help that problem. Above line only helps when updating
from an old working LinuxBIOS to a new one.

For getting the mac address from the machine's legacy bios, we would
have to add a whole bunch of logic to flashrom:

* Determine that it's a transition from awardbios to linuxbios (safely)
* read the mac address (will it always be the same position for all
  award bios updates in the future?)
* patch the to-be-flashed linuxbios image on the fly.

Such a transition is not exactly free of risks.

There might be another solution if we accept that the machine's mac
address will change.

We could use 4 fixed bytes and generate the last 4 bytes from
/dev/urandom during _build_. This would leave us with a working machine
with a reasonable mac address. Then, with above line you prevent that
the mac address changes between linuxbios updates.

Stefan

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