Subject: Re: net: rtl8169: EEE seems to be ok (was: Re: [PATCH RFC net-next 00/23] net: phylink managed EEE support)

From: "Russell King (Oracle)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2024 10:49:25 +0000

On Tue, Nov 26, 2024 at 12:51:36PM +0000, Russell King (Oracle) wrote:
> In doing this, I came across the fact that the addition of phylib
> managed EEE support has actually broken a huge number of drivers -
> phylib will now overwrite all members of struct ethtool_keee whether
> the netdev driver wants it or not. This leads to weird scenarios where
> doing a get_eee() op followed by a set_eee() op results in e.g.
> tx_lpi_timer being zeroed, because the MAC driver doesn't know it needs
> to initialise phylib's phydev->eee_cfg.tx_lpi_timer member. This mess
> really needs urgently addressing, and I believe it came about because
> Andrew's patches were only partly merged via another party - I guess
> highlighting the inherent danger of "thou shalt limit your patch series
> to no more than 15 patches" when one has a subsystem who's in-kernel
> API is changing.

Looking at the rtl8169 driver, it looks pretty similar to the Marvell
situation. The value stored in tp->tx_lpi_timer is apparently,
according to r8169_get_tx_lpi_timer_us(), a value in bytes, not in a
unit of time. So it's dependent on the negotiated speed, and thus we
can't read it to set the initial phydev->eee_cfg.tx_lpi_timer state,
because in the _probe() function, the PHY may not have negotiated a
speed.

However, this driver writes keee->tx_lpi_timer after
phy_ethtool_get_eee() which means that it overrides phylib, so hasn't
been broken.

Therefore, I think rtl8169 is fine.

-- 
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