Re: [RFC PATCH net-next] net: phy: rust: add experimental Davicom PHY driver
From: Muchamad Coirul Anwar <hidden>
Date: 2026-03-13 00:44:43
Also in:
lkml, rust-for-linux
Hi Andrew, On Wed, Mar 11, 2026 at 20:36 Andrew Lunn [off-list ref] wrote:
That is not really how Linux works. The Maintainers don't go out searching for hardware which should be supported. Developers come to us with patches. One place you might look is Openwrt. They often have drivers for hardware which never make it upstream to Mainline. Take such a driver, buy the hardware, and port it to Rust. But please make sure it is really a new device, not just a variant of an existing family of devices which already has a driver.
Thank you for the excellent pointer regarding OpenWrt. I wasn't fully aware of how many out-of-tree drivers are maintained there out of necessity. I will spend the next week researching the OpenWrt source tree for unsupported PHY chips. My goal is to find a device that strictly meets three criteria: it is a genuinely new chip (not a variant), the hardware is physically purchasable, and the register datasheet is publicly available without an NDA. If hardware availability or closed documentation proves to be a hard blocker after this timeboxed research, I will likely pivot to other subsystems (such as IIO or hwmon) where hardware documentation is generally more open, to continue my Rust driver contributions. I will drop this Davicom RFC for now. Thank you again for your time, review, and for pointing me in the right direction. It has been incredibly helpful. Best regards, Muchamad Coirul Anwar