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Hi Andrew
On 06/29/2017 10:41 AM, Andrew Lunn wrote:

quoted

Transceivers for CAN are not apart of any model. Traditional CAN didn't
have a problem because all transceivers from my understanding supported
the maximum speed of 1 Mbps defined by the spec. However, with the
introduction of CAN Flexible Datarate mode it seems that for
transceivers that supported CAN-FD the maximum supported speeds vary.

So transceivers are dumb devices, nothing to configure, so no need to
have a driver for them.

quoted

Now that I think of it
you also can't determine if the transceiver supports CAN-FD in the first
place. IP that supports CAN-FD is backwards compatible with standard
CAN. Therefore, its feasible that you may even use a transceiver that
doesn't support CAN-FD. So I would think something like the below would
be needed.

mcan@0 {
	...
	fixed-transceiver {
	      max-canfd-speed = <2000>
	};
	...
};

Are there likely to be other transceiver properties? Adding a subnode
may not make sense if this is going to be the only property.

Also, 2KHz is not very fast :-)

Taking a quick look in Documentation/devicetree/bindings/net/can, it
seems a bit of a wild west. No standardization, no central binding
which CAN drivers are expected to support, etc. This sounds like a
generic problem, not an mcan problem. So document this property
centrally, implement the parsing of it centrally, etc, to encourage
other CAN drivers to use it, rather than re-invent the wheel.

As of now its the only property that I think is needed. In general from
past experience and threads it seems that people are fairly adamant
about having DT mimic hardware as closely as possible. So since from a
hardware perspective the transceiver is an external device that is
connected to the CAN IP it would make sense for a subnode to be used to
model it. But either way works for me. If the device tree folks do not
care for subnode to be created then I can just add a property.

Also I agree that attempting to make this optional property/subnode
generic to all of CAN would be preferable. Another not sure if its
feasible yet without standardization being first forced across all CAN
drivers.

	   Andrew