On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 3:49 PM Saravana Kannan [off-list ref] wrote:

On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 12:58 PM Andrew Lunn [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

quoted

PHY seems to be one of those cases where it's okay to have the
compatible property but also okay to not have it.

Correct. They are like PCI or USB devices. You can ask it, what are
you? There are two registers in standard locations which give you a
vendor and product ID. We use that to find the correct driver.

For all the cases of PHYs that currently don't need any compatible
string, requiring a compatible string of type "ethernet-phy-standard"
would have been nice. That would have made PHYs consistent with the
general DT norm of "you need a compatible string to be matched with
the device". Anyway, it's too late to do that now. So I'll have to
deal with this some other way (I have a bunch of ideas, so it's not
the end of the world).

This is not the first time the need for compatible strings for MDIO
devices has come up, but MDIO devices are special (evidently). I
should have taken a harder stance on this which should be simply, if
your device requires having a node in DT, then it requires a
compatible string.

Rob