Tue, Jul 02, 2019 at 01:49:44PM CEST, mkubecek@suse.cz wrote:

Permanent hardware address of a network device was traditionally provided
via ethtool ioctl interface but as Jiri Pirko pointed out in a review of
ethtool netlink interface, rtnetlink is much more suitable for it so let's
add it to the RTM_NEWLINK message.

Add IFLA_PERM_ADDRESS attribute to RTM_NEWLINK messages unless the
permanent address is all zeros (i.e. device driver did not fill it). As
permanent address is not modifiable, reject userspace requests containing
IFLA_PERM_ADDRESS attribute.

Note: we already provide permanent hardware address for bond slaves;
unfortunately we cannot drop that attribute for backward compatibility
reasons.

v5 -> v6: only add the attribute if permanent address is not zero

Signed-off-by: Michal Kubecek <redacted>

Acked-by: Jiri Pirko <redacted>