unable to change mac address on vif interface

unable to change mac address on vif interface

[Nikita]

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In version 3.x it was possible to change the mac address on the vif
interface in dom0.
In xen 4.0.1 (SLES distribution) an attempt to change mac address has no
success.

ip link set vifX.X address XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
RTNETLINK answers: Operation not supported

Is it bug or feature of xen 4?

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Re: unable to change mac address on vif interface

[Ian Campbell]

On Fri, 2011-01-21 at 14:26 +0000, Nikita wrote:
> In version 3.x it was possible to change the mac address on the vif
> interface in dom0.
> In xen 4.0.1 (SLES distribution) an attempt to change mac address has
> no success. 
> ip link set vifX.X address XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX
> RTNETLINK answers: Operation not supported
> 
> 
> Is it bug or feature of xen 4?

Neither, it is a bug/feature of the kernel you are using.

Looking at both the historical Xen kernels and the newer pvops kernels
it appears that netfront has always correctly implemented the necessary
driver hook (->set_mac_address in older kernels and
->ndo_set_mac_address in newer) while netback has never done so.

What domain 0 kernel version are you running? Which version worked?

I suspect using the generic eth_validate_addr and eth_mac_addr
implementations for the ndo_set_mac_address and ndo_validate_addr hooks
respectively in netback too will be sufficient.

Can you cook up a patch?

Ian.