Subject: Re: RFC: blueprint for proxy PHY module

From: Tomas Hlavacek <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 02 Mar 2016 15:24:01 +0100

Hi Andrew!

On Thu, Feb 25, 2016 at 4:31 PM, Andrew Lunn <[email-masked]> wrote:
>>  Question is how to connect the userspace? I think that corresponding
>>  file in /sys would do the job, but I am not sure whether it is the
>>  proper way of doing that. (?)
> 
> A historian might be able to help you. Going back to the days of
> 10MBps Ethernet, cards used to have a few different ports, AUI, BNC
> and TP. The kernel probably supports configuring which to use,
> probably via ethtool. Your use case is not that different, so you can
> probably reuse it.

Extending the ethtool ops in the driver (namely mvneta) seems to be 
possible and it seems that I could add more phy_dev pointers to the 
private data of the driver and switch among them quite easily. But it 
would be driver specific hack and I believe this problem is more 
general.

Perhaps I can pass some common PHY switch command from the driver to 
the prospective phy-proxy module. I'll come back to this question when 
I haveproof-of-concept code.

Btw. thanks for the pointer to the phylink patchset.

Tomas