Re: [PATCH v2] net: usb: r8152: Add in new Devices that are supported for Mac-Passthru

Hi Bjorn,

*From:* Bjørn Mork [off-list ref]
*Sent:* May 11, 2022 10:02
David Ober [off-list ref] writes:

<snip>

I beleive I've said this before, but these policies would have been much
better handled in userspace with the system mac address being a resource
made available by some acpi driver. But whatever.

We did look into this - but it got really messy quickly with moving
between user and kernel space and assigning the MAC. We didn't spend
ages on it but came to the conclusion it was far from easy.

I'm very happy to do a patch in thinkpad_acpi to expose the MAC to user
space (via a sysfs node) and to use that to work towards a better
solution, but think we'll need help for determining how that would work.

In the meantime we'd love the dock and the dongles to work for Lenovo
customers. We have had a bunch of customer issues raised where they're
using the system MAC (for either system ID, or in PXE server setups)
where not having this feature work has been a pain. The feature is used.

I believe David is going to address your point about the IDs.

I'd like to continue with this approach until we have something better.
Any suggestions who should I talk with for a longer term solution?

 I look forward to
seeing the FCC unlock logic for Lenovo X55 modems added to the
drivers/bus/mhi/host/pci_generic.c driver.

I'm afraid that cannot happen - and I don't really want to drag this
thread sideways on that topic as it's completely not related. I'm very
happy to have a separate conversation about it (either privately or
publicly) if it will help. I will happily agree the FCC unlock sucks.

Mark