Re: [PATCH v2 0/5] Generic PHY Framework

On Tuesday 19 February 2013, Kishon Vijay Abraham I wrote:

Added a generic PHY framework that provides a set of APIs for the PHY drivers
to create/destroy a PHY and APIs for the PHY users to obtain a reference to
the PHY with or without using phandle. To obtain a reference to the PHY
without using phandle, the platform specfic intialization code (say from board
file) should have already called phy_bind with the binding information. The
binding information consists of phy's device name, phy user device name and an
index. The index is used when the same phy user binds to mulitple phys.

This framework will be of use only to devices that uses external PHY (PHY
functionality is not embedded within the controller).

The intention of creating this framework is to bring the phy drivers spread
all over the Linux kernel to drivers/phy to increase code re-use and to
increase code maintainability.

Comments to make PHY as bus wasn't done because PHY devices can be part of
other bus and making a same device attached to multiple bus leads to bad
design.

How does this relate to the generic PHY interfaces in drivers/net/phy?

Do you expect that to get merged into drivers/phy in the long run, or
do you want to keep the generic phy only for everything but ethernet?

I think it would be problematic to have two alternative interfaces for
ethernet PHYs because then an ethernet driver still needs to decide
which subsystem to interface with.

	Arnd