Hi Russell, On 13/01/2026 21:03, Russell King (Oracle) wrote: > On Tue, Jan 13, 2026 at 08:24:49PM +0100, Maxime Chevallier wrote: >> Hi Russell, >>> Traditionally, we've represented the SerDes using drivers/phy rather >>> than the drivers/net/phy infrastructure, mainly because implementations >>> hvaen't provided anything like an 802.3 PHY register set, but moreover >>> because the SerDes tends to be generic across ethernet, PCIe, USB, SATA >>> etc (basically, anything that is a high speed balanced pair serial >>> communication) and thus the "struct phy" from drivers/phy can be used >>> by any of these subsystems. >>> >> >> True, and I completely agree with that. The reason I didn't touch that >> when porting to phylink is that the device I'm using, that has a >> Motorola/Freescale/NXP MPC832x, doesn't have that TBI/RTBI block, so I >> can't test that at all should we move to a more modern SerDes driver >> (modern w.r.t when this driver was written) :( > > Over the last few days, I've been adding "generic" stmmac SerDes > support (which basically means not in the platform glue) to replace > the qcom-ethqos stuff, and while doing so, the thought did cross my > mind whether I should be adding that to phylink rather than stmmac.
You mean controlling the generic PHY (phy_power_on / off, phy_set_mode_ext and so on) from phylink instead of the MAC driver, like we also do in mvneta / mvpp2 ? That would also interest the Meta folks working on fbnic I guess :) Maxime
