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A MAC address is an identifier of a node or group of nodes on the network that determines the location from which data is received and to which data is sent. The three types of MDI destination addresses are:
MAC addresses are accessed and controlled with the following:
The size of a MAC address is media dependent, and is implied by the media type that the driver returns in the MAC_INFO_ACK(D7mdi) primitive. For Ethernet, CSMA/CD, Gigabit Ethernet, Token Ring, and FDDI media, the MAC address is 6 octets. The MDI kernel functions that utilize these addresses assume the 6 octet size.
Link layers such as ISDN that do not utilize MAC addresses should respond to the MACIOC_GETRADDR primitive so that upper-layer calls will fail gracefully. Any ioctls that are not supported must be NAK'ed by the driver.