rpi3 - changing MAC address of ue0 between GENERIC and GENERIC-NODEBUG kernels

[Sylvain Garrigues]

Hello,

> Le 24 oct. 2017 à 09:33, Ralf Wenk <iz-rpi03 at hs-karlsruhe.de> a écrit :
> 
> the MAC address of the ue0 interface on my
> rpi 3 is changing 

In the RPI case, the MAC address as seen by FreeBSD is read by the if_smc kernel driver from the mac-address or the local-mac-address property of the boot dtb (see code in sys/dev/usb/net/if_smc.c). Otherwise it is indeed set to a random value during boot. 

Obviously the stock DTB (either upstream ones or FreeBSD ones) don’t know the MAC address, so the actual and real HW MAC address is initialized by the rpi firmware in the node pointed to by the “ethernet” alias in the dtb. 

There were changes a few months ago both in upstream DTBs and firmware related about this: see for instance https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/846 and https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/commit/23047785b7414111cb7cb80aa9d0042c99fae437

You may want to try to download / compile more recent versions of firmware / DTB / u-boot than the 2017.01 from ports and check if they solved this issue.

Sylvain