On Thu, Nov 03, 2022 at 05:06:39PM -0400, Sean Anderson wrote:

For a long time, PCSs have been tightly coupled with their MACs. For
this reason, the MAC creates the "phy" or mdio device, and then passes
it to the PCS to initialize. This has a few disadvantages:

- Each MAC must re-implement the same steps to look up/create a PCS
- The PCS cannot use functions tied to device lifetime, such as devm_*.
- Generally, the PCS does not have easy access to its device tree node

Is there a clear need to solve these disadvantages? There comes extra
runtime complexity with the PCS-as-device scheme (plus the extra
complexity needed to address the DT backwards compatibility problems
it causes; not addressed here).