On 11/03/16 15:08, Andrew Lunn wrote: > Currently, supporting a fixed-phy in a MAC driver is a bit messy. It > needs to be explicit supported, since a fixed phy is somewhat > different from a normal phy. > > These two patches solve this by making fixed-phys appear as normal > PHYs within device tree, allowing them to be referenced by a phandle. > Any MAC driver that supports phy-handle can then automatically support > a fixed-phy without any code change.
Humm, if that's the problem we want to solve, we could introduce a helper function which tries to locate the phy using a 'phy-handle' property, and if it fails falls back to looking for a fixed-link property and use that if desired. That behavior could either be automatic, or controlled via boolean flag for instance which indicates whether fallback is appropriate? I am not sure the virtual MDIO bus is looking much better in that regard, it does provide a good model for how the fixed PHYs are implemented: as a virtual MDIO bus, but that seems quite a bit of a stretch here... -- Florian