RFC: PHY Abstraction Layer II

[James Chapman]

Hi Andy,

Can you elaborate on why this phy abstraction is needed?

In your original post, you mentioned that you were going to post a
patch to show how your code would be hooked up in an existing net
driver. Did I miss it? It would help in understanding the pros and cons
of using genphy over using plain old mii.c.

btw, I recently posted a patch to add GigE support to mii.c which is
in Jeff's netdev-2.6 queue. Some register definitions were added in
mii.h that will collide with yours.

/james

Andy Fleming wrote:

> 
> On Mar 8, 2005, at 21:50, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> 
>> On Tue, 2005-03-08 at 19:42 -0800, David S. Miller wrote:
>>
>>> On Wed, 09 Mar 2005 13:14:16 +1100
>>> Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh at kernel.crashing.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I'll have a closer look when I find some time, see if it makes sense to
>>>> adapt sungem or not.
>>>
>>>
>>> Especially because of the Broadcom PHYs I bet it doesn't.
>>>
>>> Too many chips have to reset the MAC, or do other fancy stuff
>>> when programming the PHY to make this genphy thing very useful.
>>
>>
>> Oh, I think genphy is just a generic driver, but his layer has hooks for
>> other PHY drivers (wasn't it based on sungem_phy in the first place ?)
> 
> 
> Definitely.  Much of this code was culled from the sungem and ibm_emac 
> drivers, with some input from mii.c.  The genphy driver is just one of 
> the 6 PHY drivers in the patch I sent (the others are Marvell, Davicom, 
> Cicada, QS, LXT).  Actually, several of those files have multiple 
> drivers in them.  The genphy driver is the fallback driver.  It exists 
> for those PHYs which never get a driver, but don't need special attention.
> 
>>
>> I discussed several steps of the design with Andy, the idea was to have
>> something a bit like sungem_phy.c with addditional common library for
>> doing the link polling & fallback stuff etc... that could be easily
>> shared by drivers.
> 
> 
> Yup.  I look forward to your input on how well the code meshes with what 
> people need for their drivers.
> 
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