On Wed, Aug 29, 2018 at 05:40:44PM -0700, Moritz Fischer wrote:

Add support for fixed-link cases where no MDIO is
actually required to run the device.
In that case no MDIO bus is instantiated since the
actual registers are not available in hardware.

Hi Moritz

There are a few different use cases here:

The hardware is missing MDIO - You need fixed-link.

The hardware has MDIO, but you don't have a PHY connected on it, and
use fixed link.

The hardware has MDIO, and it is used e.g. for an Ethernet switch, or
a PHY for another Ethernet interface. Plus you need fixed link.

The binding typically looks like:

&fec1 {
        phy-mode = "rmii";
        pinctrl-names = "default";
        pinctrl-0 = <&pinctrl_fec1>;
        status = "okay";

        fixed-link {
                speed = <100>;
                full-duplex;
        };

        mdio1: mdio {
                #address-cells = <1>;
                #size-cells = <0>;
                status = "okay";

                switch0: switch0@0 {
                        compatible = "marvell,mv88e6085";
                        pinctrl-names = "default";
                        pinctrl-0 = <&pinctrl_switch>;
                        reg = <0>;
                        eeprom-length = <512>;
                        interrupt-parent = <&gpio3>;

It is important you have the mdio subnode, with PHYs and switches as
children. The driver currently gets this wrong, it uses
pdev->dev.of_node.

So the first patch should be to extend this behaviour. Look for a
child node called mdio. If it exists, call nixge_mdio_setup() passing
that child. Otherwise continue using pdev->dev.of_node, so you don't
break backwards compatibility.

Then a patch adding support for fixed-link. If the mdio child node
exists, you still need to register the MDIO bus. If there is no child
node, but there is a fixed-link, skip registering the mdio bus with
pdev->dev.of_node.

	Andrew