Subject: Re: [PATCH RFC net-next] net: phy: add Marvell PHY PTP support [multicast/DSA issues]

From: Russell King - ARM Linux admin <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2020 12:06:14 +0100

On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 06:19:32AM -0700, Richard Cochran wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 11:58:07AM +0100, Russell King - ARM Linux admin wrote:
> > How do we deal with this situation - from what I can see from the
> > ethtool API, we have to make a choice about which to use.  How do we
> > make that choice?
> 
> Unfortunately the stack does not implement simultaneous MAC + PHY time
> stamping.  If your board has both, then you make the choice to use the
> PHY by selecting NETWORK_PHY_TIMESTAMPING at kernel compile time.
> 
> (Also some MAC drivers do not defer to the PHY properly.  Sometimes
> you can work around that by de-selecting the MAC's PTP function in the
> Kconfig if possible, but otherwise you need to patch the MAC driver.)
>  
> > Do we need a property to indicate whether we wish to use the PHY
> > or MAC PTP stamping, or something more elaborate?
> 
> To do this at run time would require quite some work, I expect.

Okay, I'm falling into horrible multicast issues with DSA switches
while trying to test.

Some of my platforms have IP_MULTICAST=y, others have IP_MULTICAST=n.
This causes some to send IGMP messages when binding to the multicast
address, others do not.

Those that do cause the DSA switch to add a static database entry
causing all traffic for that multicast address to be only directed to
the port(s) that the machine(s) with IP_MULTICAST=y kernels are
connected to, depriving all IP_MULTICAST=n machines from seeing those
packets.

Maybe, with modern networking technology, it's about time that the
kernel configuration help recommended that kernels should be built
with IP_MULTICAST=y ?

-- 
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