> OK, now I think I understand. Yes, the MAC can be hardwired to a switch. > In fact, there are system designs that do exactly that. > > We try to handle this case by not having a "phy-handle" property in the > device tree. The link to the remote device (switch IC in this case) is > brought up on ndo_open()
O.K, so you totally ignore the Linux way of doing this and hack together your own proprietary solution. > There may be opportunities to improve how this works in the future, but the > current code is serviceable. It might be serviceable, but it will never get into mainline. For mainline, you need to use DSA. http://elixir.free-electrons.com/linux/v4.9.60/source/Documentation/networking/dsa/dsa.txt Getting back to my original point, having these platform devices can cause issues for DSA. Freescale FMAN has a similar architecture, and it took a while to restructure it to make DSA work. https://www.spinics.net/lists/netdev/msg459394.html Andrew
