Subject: Re: [PATCH net-next 13/14] net: stmmac: provide PCS initialisation hook

From: "Russell King (Oracle)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2025 22:32:00 +0100

On Wed, Oct 15, 2025 at 11:11:22PM +0200, Andrew Lunn wrote:
> > +	/* Unimplemented PCS init (as indicated by stmmac_do_callback()
> > +	 * perversely returning -EINVAL) is non-fatal.
> > +	 */
> > +	ret = stmmac_mac_pcs_init(priv);
> > +	if (ret != -EINVAL)
> > +		return ret;
> 
> Oh, that's ugly.

Yes, I completely agree, and...

> which added this, i don't actually see a user of the returned EINVAL.
> EOPNOTSUPP would of been better. But changing it now will need quite a
> bit of review work :-(

Yes. Maybe at some point in the future it can be addressed - it will
become an issue if we end up with an implementation of these methods
that returns -EINVAL to really mean failure.

However, it's a non-zero chunk of work to go through every single
caller of numerous methods to make the change. It may be possible to
introduce a new base-helper that returns -EOPNOTSUPP and switch
groups of methods... but given my present backlog, it's not something
I'm going to rush to do!

-- 
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