Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH net-next 0/2] DT MDIO bus of fixed phys

From: Florian Fainelli <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2016 15:26:42 -0800

On 11/03/16 15:08, Andrew Lunn wrote:
> Currently, supporting a fixed-phy in a MAC driver is a bit messy. It
> needs to be explicit supported, since a fixed phy is somewhat
> different from a normal phy.
> 
> These two patches solve this by making fixed-phys appear as normal
> PHYs within device tree, allowing them to be referenced by a phandle.
> Any MAC driver that supports phy-handle can then automatically support
> a fixed-phy without any code change.

Humm, if that's the problem we want to solve, we could introduce a
helper function which tries to locate the phy using a 'phy-handle'
property, and if it fails falls back to looking for a fixed-link
property and use that if desired. That behavior could either be
automatic, or controlled via boolean flag for instance which indicates
whether fallback is appropriate?

I am not sure the virtual MDIO bus is looking much better in that
regard, it does provide a good model for how the fixed PHYs are
implemented: as a virtual MDIO bus, but that seems quite a bit of a
stretch here...
-- 
Florian