2. Whether similar work has been proposed previously.

There was a presentation at netdev conf last year about this topic,
and how you use it to configure SERDES eyes. And then a long
discussion on the netdev mailing afterwards. You should read the
discussion, and incorporate the ideas. There was a couple of points
raised:

SERDES are also used for PCIe, USB, SATA, and they have similar
capabilities to a SERDES used for networking. Do we want a networking
specific solution, or something more generic?

You need to include lane information, since there can be 1, 2 or 4
lanes involved, and you need to specify which lane you want to test.

      Andrew