On May 9, 2011, at 12:30 AM, Adrian Chadd wrote: > On 8 May 2011 21:16, Marius Strobl <mar...@alchemy.franken.de> wrote: > > [snip] > >> Depends on what you understand by properly. One idea I particularly >> like is to handle switch ports as pseudo-interfaces hanging off of the >> the MAC driver parent roughly similar to vlan(4). That way you'd have >> per port link status and could configure the media. > > The reason I like this is because I realise that these switch PHYs > tend to have quite a bit of varying but useful functionality, that > isn't just "multi-port single-VLAN switch PHY." > > Besides there being per-port status, there can also be per-port > error/packet/byte counts, VLAN setups (tagged/untagged), QoS > configuration, sometimes some L2 filtering and (even more creepy) > sometimes L3 filtering/routing. > > They can sometimes hang off the MII bus, but ISTR datasheets which > show they can hang off an SPI bus too. So although they can look like > PHYs complete with the register layouts, there's extended commands to > implement other features as well. There may even be more than one CPU > ethernet port hooked up - I think the Routerstation Pro has both CPU > GigE ports wired to the switch PHY and defaults to mapping port 1 -> > arge0 and Port 2,3,4,5 -> arge1. > > I'd really appreciate it if someone were able to sit down, take the > existing work done by Luiz and others and flesh out a bare minimum set > of switch PHY drivers that configure them with some sensible defaults > (rather than leaving it up to the boot firmware to do it for you) and > have all of the interface/configuration glue in the kernel. As I said > earlier, figuring out how to expose all the functionality - including > per-port error counts and such - can come later.
Yes. Agreed. Stated a bit more elegantly than I just did... Handling non-localized connections is critical here. The embedded world has a lot of funky interconnects that map poorly into our device model. Having the association handled at a higher level will help us connect these things. In the designs I've seen, this can happen both for the switches we're talking about, as well as PHYs. I believe there are some CPUs where talking to the PHY doesn't go through the MAC.... Warner_______________________________________________ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-hackers-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
