> It's confusing, I guess these PHY's don't come and go > very much so the plug/play part isn't really exercised.
Very true. We sometimes need to handle -EPROBE_DEFER, which is not too different from hot-plugging PHYs. Also, SFP modules are hot-pluggable, and can contain a copper PHY. However, SFP modules don't have a traditional MIDO bus. MDIO is tunnelled over i2c. So when a copper SFP module is hotplugged, the MDIO bus is hot plugged as well. If you do decided to make any changes here, please ask Russell King to test, otherwise you might break this use case. Andrew