On Tue, Feb 24, 2026 at 6:04 PM Принтер Принтеров
[off-list ref] wrote:

Thank you for the feedback, Miguel. You raise a fair point.

  Honestly, the new abstraction here (speed() getter) is quite minor --
  it just reads a struct field. The driver itself doesn't bootstrap
  anything significant beyond what ax88796b_rust already covers.

  I'm looking to contribute to Rust in the kernel and started with PHY
  drivers because the abstraction is well established. But I understand
  now that duplicating C drivers isn't the goal.

  Could you point me toward areas where Rust work would be most
  valuable? I'm happy to work on new abstractions or drivers that
  actually need bootstrapping, rather than adding another reference
  driver to an area that's already covered.

To clarify, if the netdev maintainers want to have more reference
drivers, it is up to them, i.e. please do not feel discouraged by what
I said. :) I just thought I should mention it in case there was some
confusion.

Regarding new drivers, if you want to work around networking, then
probably the maintainers can tell you what is needed. In general, I
would suggest looking for hardware that is unsupported currently --
that is usually way easier to justify and land, and there is no
concern about duplication (and possibly arch support is not a worry
too, since there is no other driver anyway).

Regarding new abstractions or other kinds of work, you may want to
look into existing driver's lists like:

  - https://docs.kernel.org/next/gpu/nova/core/todo.html
  - https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/panfrost/linux/-/issues/?label_name%5B%5D=tyr

We have also threads in Zulip about looking for things to work on --
in case you haven't seen them, you may want to take a look at e.g.

  https://rust-for-linux.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/291565-Help/topic/Looking.20for.20open.20issue

Finally, you probably know this, but you can always help not just by
writing code, but by reviewing patches and testing them -- that is
very needed, gets you credit in the Git log, and by doing so you will
likely realize what other things you could work on around the same
areas you start to review.

I hope that helps!

Cheers,
Miguel