OK, now I think I understand.  Yes, the MAC can be hardwired to a switch.
In fact, there are system designs that do exactly that.

We try to handle this case by not having a "phy-handle" property in the
device tree.  The link to the remote device (switch IC in this case) is
brought up on ndo_open()

O.K, so you totally ignore the Linux way of doing this and hack
together your own proprietary solution.
 

There may be opportunities to improve how this works in the future, but the
current code is serviceable.

It might be serviceable, but it will never get into mainline. For
mainline, you need to use DSA.

http://elixir.free-electrons.com/linux/v4.9.60/source/Documentation/networking/dsa/dsa.txt

Getting back to my original point, having these platform devices can
cause issues for DSA. Freescale FMAN has a similar architecture, and
it took a while to restructure it to make DSA work.

https://www.spinics.net/lists/netdev/msg459394.html

	Andrew
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