On Tue, Nov 14, 2006 at 11:37:15AM -0500, Jeff Dike wrote:
> This address range is documented - look for assignment of MAC ranges
> to NIC manufacturers.  This range will be documented as reserved for
> private use or something similar.

Half of all MAC-48 addresses are "locally administered": those with the
second-least-significant bit of the first byte set.

> BTW, recent UMLs changed to using entirely random MACs.

Not entirely random. random_ether_addr() makes sure the generated
address has the "locally administered" bit set, and the broadcast bit
cleared:

include/linux/etherdevice.h:

/**
 * random_ether_addr - Generate software assigned random Ethernet address
 * @addr: Pointer to a six-byte array containing the Ethernet address
 *
 * Generate a random Ethernet address (MAC) that is not multicast
 * and has the local assigned bit set.
 */
static inline void random_ether_addr(u8 *addr)
{
        get_random_bytes (addr, ETH_ALEN);
        addr [0] &= 0xfe;       /* clear multicast bit */
        addr [0] |= 0x02;       /* set local assignment bit (IEEE802) */
}

Jason

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