RFSoC boards with same HWaddr. How they can be set to the hardware MAC?

[juliancasallas]

Hi All,

My issue is we have 2 RFSoC evaluation boards which have the same HWaddr. We are using the evaluation zip file which has a vivado project and also the board images loaded into the SD card.  I may assume that both boars have the same HWaddr beacuse we are using the same image, is this correct? if so, how we can set the HWaddr to real MAC of the ethernet chip?.

Thanks 

[nanz]

Hi @juliancasallas ,

Is this the linux image that you are trying to load? Once loaded, can you please do a "ifconfig" and check? This should show the MAC address.

This can be changed by adding MAC address in DTS node or in Linux.

Please share your log files or screenshot so we can look into that more.

[juliancasallas]

@nanz , thanks for helping,  please see my picture enclosed, I can do 2 things, I can use petalinux to compile and build the kernel again adding the node you mentioned which I do not know how to do it but willing to learn and look into, or I can try to fix this issue from linux side if this is the case. However, I would like to try both just to learn a bit more.

thanks again.

[nanz · Accepted solution]

Hi @juliancasallas ,

In Linux, you can try:

ifconfig eth0 down

ifconfig eth0 hw ether 00:11:22:33:44:55

ifconfig eth0 up

Or in system_user.dtsi, you can try something similar like below and re-build Petalinux project.

ethernet@e000b000 {
.....
local-mac-address = [00 0a 35 00 00 01];
....;

[juliancasallas]

As far as I know, each Ethernet chip has its own IP address based on the manufacture ID, etc..., I wonder if I can use the same  here without the need to create a new MAC address.

Finally what would be the best practices when deploying for production. If you have a Xilinx user/design  guide would be great to have a look.

Thanks

[patocarr]

Hi @juliancasallas 

  For best practices I'd suggest looking into U-Boot environment to save the MAC address. This is a flash partition that U-Boot uses to save non-volatile information, including the MAC. You will set the address with the setenv ethaddr command, and then save the environment to flash with saveenv. I've written about it in an article on my blog U-Boot handling MAC address.

Thanks,

-Pat