Hello,
OpenWrt and several derived projects typically deal with devices - mostly "routers" - that bundle several netif devices (ethernet and WiFi) in them.
These built-in netif devices have different MAC addresses assigned to them. However, the vendor typically chooses one of those MAC addresses and puts it on a sticker on the outside of the (bundle) device.
The choice of the netif device which bears the address is observed to be arbitrary (although not equally distributed).
For the user, the "sticker MAC address" is equivalent to a name or an identifier which allows him to uniquely identify his (bundle) device. This can be exploited (and is, in fact) e.g. to name routers in networks ("Freifunk" communities), to provide device-specific default-SSIDs (OpenWrt-ddeeff for MAC address aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff), etc.
The "sticker MAC address" uniquely qualifies for this task as it obvious to the user and is given in a standardized and reusable format. MAC address stickers will be found on billions of consumer "routers".
As the device tree defines an assembled piece of hardware, we are convinced that the "sticker MAC address" qualifies as a property which should be a part of it.
Since the MAC address will already be bound to an existing (ethernet or WiFi) device, I propose defining an alias which refers to the node of the device bearing the primary mac address of a (bundle) device, e.g.
aliases {
primary-mac-address = ð0;
};
What do you think?
Best
Adrian Schmutzler
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