On Thu, Nov 27, 2025 at 04:31:50PM +0100, Maxime Chevallier wrote:

Hi Andrew

I am sorry, I have a bit of sidetracking...

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State Persistence and Toggling When toggling autoneg (e.g., autoneg on -> off
-> on), should the kernel or driver cache the previous advertisement?

This has been discussed in the past, and i _think_ phylink does.

But before we go too far into edge causes, my review experience is
that MAC drivers get the basics wrong. What we really want to do here
is:

1) Push driver developers towards phylink

Is it something we should insist on in the review process ? Can we make
it a hard requirement that _new_ MAC drivers need to use phylink, if the
driver plans to interact with a PHY ?

phylink has long outgrown the original use-case of supporting SFPs by
abstracting away the MAc to [PHY/SFP] interactions, it's now used as a
an abstraction layer that avoids MAC drivers making the same mistakes
over and over again on a lot of cases that don't have anything to do
with SFP.

This is something i've been considering for a while.

Maybe for the last year, when i have seen broken pause, i've been
reporting the problems but also pushing developers towards
phylink. phylink also does all the business logic for EEE, and is
starting to get WoL support. So we really should be pushing developers
in that direction.

Is it time to deprecated direct phylib access?

I think the answer is Yes.

	Andrew