The BeagleBoard xm has no fixed MAC address. During startup, a random MAC address is created and used. This is a problem if you wanna use it in your local LAN with Firewalls. It also is a problem to assign a fixed IP to the board, because the MAC address changes.

I searched and tried a lot of things to set a fixed MAC address. All hints didn't work:

Set an udev rule to assign a fixed MAC address
or configure eth0 with a fixed hwaddress

Well, to get a fixed MAC address I had to patch my image but how? I built my Angstrom image from scratch but all sources were downloaded as archives and bitbaker extracts/compiles the sources automatically. I found no documentation for manuall patching. And I didn't know what I should patch.

So I started researching. The network module was smsc95xx but I had no idea which version was used for the kernel. I had to find out the version before I could search a patch...

I knew that the file was stored in a directory with the name drivers/net/usb. All source archives are available in <dir>/setup-scripts/sources/downloads. An archive search should find the right archive but I had to find the build file for the kernel...

After some hours googling I found that <dir>/setup-scripts/sources/meta-ti/recipes-kernel/linux contains kernel buildfiles, but more than one! I figured out that linux-mainline_3.2.bb was the right buildfile. I checked the content and found the link to the source archive (online). After reading the source file I knew that the following patch should work: MAC address patch. Some details about this patch are available here.

I had a patch file and knew the buildfile but how should I apply the patch? It was not too complex because the buildfile already contained a list of patchfiles. I added my patchfile to the list and copied it to the same directory where all other patchfiles were stored.

The next step was the rebuild of my image... Sounds simple but how? It was simple with following commands:

Some hours later, I had a new kernel and recreated my SD card. To set a MAC address, I changed uEnv.txt:

It works!