On Tue, Feb 06, 2018 at 11:41:14AM -0500, Sven Van Asbroeck wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 6, 2018 at 11:14 AM, Andrew Lunn <and...@lunn.ch> wrote:
> > Rather than invest time in this driver, it would be better to look
> > into writing a DSA driver.
>
> Thank you Andrew. I know little of DSA, but at first sight it appears to
> be a _very_ complicated beast for a switch PHY which only
> needs a few static register settings applied to it on startup, and has
> no further Linux interaction?
Hi Sven
If you want to treat it as a dumb switch, then a simple driver is
sufficient. But it can do a lot more. Do you need spanning tree, or
are you happy for your network to collapse if there is a loop? Do you
want access to statistics? Know if links are up/down? VLAN support?
Save some power by enabling EEE? DSA will give you these features.
And a DSA driver does not need to be complex. You can start simple,
and add more features later.
Andrew
