coreboot

I am producing a coreboot port on Asus P8Z77-V LE PLUS on which this issue is observed. It has a RTL8111F ethernet controller without EEPROM for vital product data.

I enabled the rtl8168 driver in coreboot so I can configure the LEDs and MAC address. Lights work great, but the MAC address always revert to 00:00:00:00:00:05 by the Linux r8169 kernel module. I would then have to reassign its proper MAC address using ip link change eno0 address <mac>.

The device appears to be taking the address I programmed, but r8169 reverts it both on init and teardown, insisting that 00:00:00:00:00:05 is its permanent MAC address.

Survival of coreboot programmed MAC address before r8169 driver is confirmed by a debug read back I inserted in the coreboot rtl81xx driver, as well as by temporarily blacklisting r8169.

Vendor firmware is unaffected.