On Thu, Jun 01, 2023 at 04:14:51PM +0200, Maxime Chevallier wrote:

There exists several examples today of devices that embed an ethernet
PHY or PCS directly inside an SoC. In this situation, either the device
is controlled through a vendor-specific register set, or sometimes
exposes the standard 802.3 registers that are typically accessed over
MDIO.

As phylib and phylink are designed to use mdiodevices, this driver
allows creating a virtual MDIO bus, that translates mdiodev register
accesses to regmap accesses.

The reason we use regmap is because there are at least 3 such devices
known today, 2 of them are Altera TSE PCS's, memory-mapped, exposed
with a 4-byte stride in stmmac's dwmac-socfpga variant, and a 2-byte
stride in altera-tse. The other one (nxp,sja1110-base-tx-mdio) is
exposed over SPI.

Signed-off-by: Maxime Chevallier <maxime.chevallier@bootlin.com>

Reviewed-by: Simon Horman <redacted>