[Xen-devel] Random MAC addresses?

[Andrew Brennan <andrew.brennan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm curious about this bit of documentation - "By default xend will select 
a random address[.]" [ http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenNetworking ]
A couple paragraphs later, this appears - "It's recommended to use a MAC 
address inside the range 00:16:3e:xx:xx:xx. This address range is reserved 
for use by Xen."  My user has MACs starting with 1A5DA4, 42A1FD and CE8CF4 
so these would appear to be bogus MACs (and potentially evidence of a bad 
ethernet driver).
The "random" bit ... is there some reason the entire MAC address should be 
selected randomly vs. using the vendor portion and randomly selecting the 
other half?  I tripped over this today while trying to track down problems 
with multiple bogus MAC addresses on a port (co-existing with VMware MACs) 
and was informed by the user that they were using Xen.  VMware appears to 
use the IEEE assigned vendor portion and randomly select the other half --
so I don't understand why Xen should go completely random in all 6 bytes
(minus 1 bit, of course) ?

... unless it's something my user has misconfigured, but I'm coming from 
the network side of the house and have never actually run Xen on anything.
andrew.

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