I've been keeping an eye on PHYLIB since it's addition to the kernel some time ago and I'm a bit curious as to why it doesn't seem to have much up-take among other drivers. A quick check of the kernel source shows only two users (AU1000 and gianfar) and both look to be embedded type devices. Are there fundamental issues with PHYLIB that prevent it from being more widely used? Is it an element of "the driver ain't broke, I'm not going to rework my PHY handling at this point"? Is PHY handling something that is just too difficult to fully abstract with various specialty nics?
To semi-answer one of my own questions, I was hoping to use PHYLIB with asix.c (a USB Ethernet driver) since the newer devices now have external PHYs and it appears that there are quite a few different ones in use by various OEMs but I found that the locking in use wasn't amenable to USB operations, since USB calls can sleep. This doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem however. The main reason I even ask is that it seems rather odd to have so many drivers that seem to have the same PHY's and yet each driver has to deal with various errata and quirks of the PHY. Having it all abstracted makes for one location to deal with things and everybody wins. -- David Hollis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
