On Monday 28 October 2013 15:56:55 Johannes Berg wrote:

On Mon, 2013-10-28 at 09:46 -0500, Dan Williams wrote:

quoted

If the device doesn't actually *have* a permanent MAC
address, then it shouldn't be returning one via ethtool,
and should return an error for ETHTOOL_GPERMADDR.

There's currently no provision for that, but I agree it would
be better to do so.

johannes

So what to do with devices which has MAC address stored in some 
obscure place and there is userspace binary which can read it?

I think that there should be some way to tell kernel that *this* 
is the permanent address and it should use it.

This is reason why I proposed patch which adding sysfs entry for 
setting permanent address from userspace in wl1251 driver.

-- 
Pali Rohár
pali.rohar@gmail.com