Re: [PATCH v3] net: phy: add Maxlinear GPY115/21x/24x driver

Hi Liang,

On Wed, Jun 23, 2021 at 12:56 PM Liang Xu [off-list ref] wrote:
[...]

Hi Martin,

1) The legacy PHY GPY111 does not share the same register format and address for WoL and LED registers. Therefore code saving with a common driver is not possible.
2) The interrupt handling routine would be different when new features are added in driver, such as PTP offload, MACsec offload. These will be added step by step as enhancement patches afte initial version of this driver upstreamed.

I think that would leave only few shared registers with the older PHYs
(and thus the intel-xway driver). Due to the lack of a public
datasheet however I have no way to confirm this.
So with this information added to the patch description having a
different driver is fine for me

Maybe Andrew can also share his opinion - based on this new
information - as he previously also suggested to extend the intel-xway
driver instead of creating a new one

3) The new PHY generation comes with a reasonable pre-configuration for the LED registers which does not need any modification usually.
   In case a customer needs a specific configuration (e.g. traffic pulsing only, no link status) he needs to configure this via MDIO. There is also another option for a fixed preconfiguration with the support of an external flash. However, this is out of scope of the driver.

older PHYs also do this, but not all boards use a reasonable LED setup

4) Many old products are mostly used on embedded devices which do not support WoL. Therefore there was no request yet to supported by the legacy XWAY driver.

my understanding of Andrew's argument is: "if the register layout is
the same for old and new PHY then why would we do some extra effort to
not add WoL support for the old PHYs"
Based on your information above the register layout is different, so
that means two different implementations are needed anyways.


Best regards,
Martin