[RFC PATCH net-next 0/9] net: pcs: Add support for devices probed in the "usual" manner

Vladimir Oltean olteanv at gmail.com
Wed Jul 20 01:38:11 AEST 2022


On Tue, Jul 19, 2022 at 11:28:42AM -0400, Sean Anderson wrote:
> Hi Vladimir,
> 
> On 7/19/22 11:25 AM, Vladimir Oltean wrote:
> > Hi Sean,
> > 
> > On Mon, Jul 11, 2022 at 12:05:10PM -0400, Sean Anderson wrote:
> >> For a long time, PCSs have been tightly coupled with their MACs. For
> >> this reason, the MAC creates the "phy" or mdio device, and then passes
> >> it to the PCS to initialize. This has a few disadvantages:
> >> 
> >> - Each MAC must re-implement the same steps to look up/create a PCS
> >> - The PCS cannot use functions tied to device lifetime, such as devm_*.
> >> - Generally, the PCS does not have easy access to its device tree node
> >> 
> >> I'm not sure if these are terribly large disadvantages. In fact, I'm not
> >> sure if this series provides any benefit which could not be achieved
> >> with judicious use of helper functions. In any case, here it is.
> >> 
> >> NB: Several (later) patches in this series should not be applied. See
> >> the notes in each commit for details on when they can be applied.
> > 
> > Sorry to burst your bubble, but the networking drivers on NXP LS1028A
> > (device tree at arch/arm64/boot/dts/freescale/fsl-ls1028a.dtsi, drivers
> > at drivers/net/ethernet/freescale/enetc/ and drivers/net/dsa/ocelot/)
> > do not use the Lynx PCS through a pcs-handle, because the Lynx PCS in
> > fact has no backing OF node there, nor do the internal MDIO buses of the
> > ENETC and of the switch.
> > 
> > It seems that I need to point this out explicitly: you need to provide
> > at least a working migration path to your PCS driver model. Currently
> > there isn't one, and as a result, networking is broken on the LS1028A
> > with this patch set.
> > 
> 
> Please refer to patches 4, 5, and 6.

I don't understand, could you be more clear? Are you saying that I
shouldn't have applied patch 9 while testing? When would be a good
moment to apply patch 9?


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