Date:	Tue, 18 Feb 2014 11:54:43 +0000
From:	Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@....com>
To:	Ben Dooks <ben.dooks@...ethink.co.uk>
Cc:	Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@...il.com>,
	Sergei Shtylyov <sergei.shtylyov@...entembedded.com>,
	netdev <netdev@...r.kernel.org>,
	"devicetree@...r.kernel.org" <devicetree@...r.kernel.org>,
	Linux-sh list <linux-sh@...r.kernel.org>,
	David Miller <davem@...emloft.net>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] net: add init-regs for of_phy support

On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 08:16:46AM +0000, Ben Dooks wrote:
> On 17/02/14 20:48, Florian Fainelli wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> 
> >>> - fixing up some design mistake?
> >>> - accounting for a specific board design?
> >>
> >>
> >>     Kind of both. This was invented to defy the necessity of having platform
> >> fixup in the DT case (where there should be no board file to place it into).
> >> I have already described that platform fixup necessary on the Renesas
> >> Lager/Koelsch boards where the LED0 signat is connected to ETH_LINK signal
> >> on the SoC and the PHY reset sets the LED control bits to default 0 which
> >> means that LED0 will be LINK/ACTIVITY signal and thus blink on activity and
> >> cause ETH_LINK to bounce off/on after each packet.
> >>
> >>
> >>> In any case a PHY fixup would do the job for you.
> >>
> >>
> >>     Not in any case. In case of DT we have no place for it, so should invent
> >> something involving DT.
> >
> > How is DT different than any machine probing mechanism here? The way
> > to involve DT is to do the following:
> >
> > if (of_machine_is_compatible("renesas,foo-board-with-broken-micrel-phy"))
> >             phy_register_fixup(&foo_board_with_broken_micrel_phy);
> 
> Oh yes, but now I have to do that for Linux, for $BSD, and for
> anything else I want to run on the device. I thought dt was meant
> to allow us to describe the hardware.

It does allow you to describe the hardware. Arbitrary register writes
aren't a description of the hardware, they're a sequence of instructions
that tells the OS nothing about the hardware and limit the ability of an
OS to do something different that might be better.

It's already the case that the OS has to have some knowledge of the
hardware that's implicit in a binding. We don't expect to have to
include bytecode to tell the OS how to poke a particular UART when it
can figure that out from a compatible string.

> If this is the case, let's just call this linuxtree and let everyone
> else get on with their own thing again.

This doesn't follow at all. Any OS needs to have some understanding of
the hardware it will try to poke. Describing a specific sequence of
writes in a DT is no more operating system independent than identifying
the hardware and expecting the OS to have a driver for it. The
requirements aren't any more suited to an individual OS in either case.

> 
> See also comment below.
> 
> > If your machine compatible string does not allow you to uniquely
> > identify your machine, this is a DT problem, as this should really be
> > the case. If you do not want to add this code to wherever this is
> > relevant in arch/arm/mach-shmobile/board-*.c, neither is
> > drivers/net/phy/phy_device.c this the place to add it.
> 
> So where should it be added? If we keep piling stuff into board files
> in arch/arm.... then we're just back to the pre-dt case and going to
> keep getting shouted at.

The general trend has been to allocate new compatible strings for
components and let individual drivers handle this.

As far as I can see your case doesn't involve any components external to
the PHY, so should probably live in a PHY driver. The PHY can have a
specific compatible string with the generic string as a fallback (if it
works to some degree without special poking).

I don't see that we need anything board-specific.

> 
> > Dealing with quirks applying to industry standard blocks is to update
> > the relevant driver, based on information provided by the specifically
> > affected systems. Failure to identify either of those correctly is a
> > problem that must not lead to a generic "let's override PHY registers
> > from DT" type of solution.
> >
> > As usual, mechanism vs policy applies even more when DT is involved.
> 
> There's an industry standard for the access method, but every PHY seems
> to have different extra setup registers for their own cases.

So? Have a driver for each PHY, or fixups for each PHY in a shared
driver.

Cheers,
Mark.
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