On Apr 13, 2007, at 09:53, David Hollis wrote:
On Wed, 2007-04-11 at 16:42 -0500, Kim Phillips wrote:
On Wed, 11 Apr 2007 03:03:56 +0200
Lennert Buytenhek <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
There may not be as much, but there definitely are still cases where
there are devices that may have one of three or four different PHYs.
I'm not in the embedded world, but while I know that there are
differences, it isn't THAT different that something as potentially
useful as PHY abstraction wouldn't be useful for regular PCI/USB
network
interfaces.
I don't think Kim intended to imply that non-embedded drivers can't
use the PHY lib. When I worked on this, it was my hope that it would
be useful to all ethernet drivers, not just the one or two I was
working on. I suspect that I could do a better job evangelizing the
code.
Or are there too many cases where NIC x needs to do these fiddlings
with
PHY y, where as NIC z has to do different fiddlings with PHY y?
I worry about this point, but I believe that a proper abstraction
must be possible. In almost every case, the PHY is a separate
device, which I have to think means that it can have its own driver,
decoupled from the ethernet driver.
Again, I don't have a lot of experience with Ethernet devices but in
looking at a lot of the different driver code, it looks like they all
fiddle with the PHYs in basically the same way, though some drivers do
more, some less. Most likely due to lack of access to errata and such
or issues just not cropping up that need to be fixed.
I agree. I've been a little disheartened to see all the patches that
have come through to fix bugs in the PHY-handling code of various
ethernet drivers. It would be great if that code could all get
collected into the PHY lib. Then we'd only have to fix the bug once,
rather than once for every ethernet driver that uses that particular
PHY.
If anyone has looked at porting an ethernet driver to the PHY lib,
and found it lacks a necessary feature, I'd love to hear about those
experiences. The locking issue is a big one, but I, too, think that
it should be fairly straightforward to work around.
Andy
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