Hi Sascha, I know this is old already, and I was surprised that I couldn't find any complaints about this yet, but I recently came across this patch in the kernel: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/patch/?id=df5cc9d0b42d15fa33b30440cca7a11ca7ba35a4 ...which was adopted in barebox as this: https://git.pengutronix.de/cgit/barebox/patch/dts/src/arm/imx6qdl.dtsi?id=2e9cce8fb1f577088e2b20ae2f461130e13ad190 As I don't know the exact reason as to why this was necessary, or why this is an issue at all, I just wanted to point out the fact that this leads to some breakage in barebox new and old. The sensible code comes from u-boot originally so maybe it is there where blame is to be found, but I can't find this code on latest u-boot anymore... The specific problem I observed is here: https://git.pengutronix.de/cgit/barebox/tree/net/eth.c#n299 But I guess this can cause other similar problems elsewhere... If you agree that all these potential places are broken, I'd like to know what the correct fix should be and I'd be happy to submit patches. The thing is: barebox has its own device-tree but nevertheless should patch the devicetree of any given Linux kernel to boot. In the aforementioned piece of code, barebox will identify an ethernet node by its full DT-path from it's own device tree (!) and associate a MAC address with that device. Later, when a kernel (+ its DT) is loaded, that DT is fixed-up with the MAC address saved earlier by searching for the ethernet node by full DT-path name. Due to the above patches, these path names (which in theory should be immutable, since the ethernet device is still connected to the same instance of the same bus at the same physical address) just happen to be different between different versions of the kernel and the bootloader. This is awful, because now old bootloaders cannot load newer kernels and newer bootloaders cannot load older kernels... again! I still hope that someone tells my that my board code is broken and that I should not do things like this to start. If not, how should this issue be solved? Best regards, -- David Jander Protonic Holland. _______________________________________________ barebox mailing list barebox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.infradead.org/mailman/listinfo/barebox
