On 09/21/2017 12:59 PM, Grant Edwards wrote:

Several years back (circa 2.6.33) I had to hack up macb.c to work on
an at91 board that didn't have a PHY connected to the macb controller.
Now I might need to get a recent kernel version running on that board.

It looks like the macb driver still can't handle boards that don't
have a PHY.  Is that correct?

Not since:

dacdbb4dfc1a1a1378df8ebc914d4fe82259ed46 ("net: macb: add fixed-link
node support")

What's the right way to deal with this?

Declaring a fixed PHY that will present an emulated link UP, with a
fixed speed/duplex etc. is the way to go.

With the older macb driver, I ended up adding code to macb.c that
presented a "fake" PHY that discarded MDIO writes and returned some
hard-wired values for MDIO reads.  That seemed like a pretty ugly way
to deal with the situation, so I never bothered to submit a patch.

Yeah, no :)
-- 
Florian