quoted

Yup, they're both marked for removal so let's just remove them
at the same time.

As soon as Paul creates a "for-2.6.25" branch, that's when I was 
planning on doing it.

Sounds like as good a time as any.

quoted

Does the kernel provide a warning to users of too-old firmware^Wuboot
telling them to update btw?

Nope.  The current U-Boot code updates mac-address and/or 
local-mac-address, whichever ones exist.  If neither exists, it 
doesn't do anything.  If both exists, it updates both with the same 
value.  This makes it DTS-agnostic, so to speak.

The kernel looks at each of the properties and uses the first one that 
has a valid MAC address.  Again, this is U-Boot- and DTS-agnostic.

Yeah, that's fine.   I just meant the current kernel (before
.25) could detect you are using a uboot that won't work after
.25 anymore, and shout at the user.  Would save you some bug
reports ;-)

In other words, the current U-Boot and Linux code is written to not 
care what the other one does.  I have no plans to remove the code in 
the kernel that looks for obsolete entries (I'm talking about function 
of_get_mac_address), because it's "safe".

Well you should remove the "address" thing, it is _not_ safe.

However, now that you mention it, I could update function 
of_get_mac_address() to display a warning if it only finds the 
'address' property.

Yeah exactly.

  That property is definitely wrong and should never be in the DTS or 
any device tree passed to the kernel.

Segher