Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 0/4] net: Revive fixed link support

From: Anton Vorontsov <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Jul 2009 22:04:48 +0400

On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 01:31:25AM -0600, Grant Likely wrote:
[...]
> Part of the problem I think is that the phylib code merges two separate
> constructs; the construct of an MDIO bus (on which many device may
> reside, not all of them PHYs), and the construct of an MII link whose
> speed and configuration need to be manipulated.  I've run into problems
> myself on how best to handle things like Ethernet switches which
> definitely do not behave like PHYs and the phylib state machine cannot
> be used on them.  It seems to me that the whole 'dummy phy' approach
> is just an artifact of the phylib model not being quite right yet.

Yep. With a bit of phylib rework we can remove all the MDIO emulation
stuff from phy/fixed.c driver, and leave there just speed/duplex/pause
assignments.

Though, I still believe that we should avoid two code paths in the
drivers. One of the code paths will be constantly broken if we do so.

> I
> want to investigate the possibility of separating the two concepts, but
> that will require a fair bit of thought and experimentation.

That would be great indeed.

[...]
> Anton, once again I don't have hardware to test this, so I rely on you
> to tell be if I screwed it up.  It has been compile tested.

Works fine here, thanks!

-- 
Anton Vorontsov
email: [email-masked]
irc://irc.freenode.net/bd2