linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH v2 1/3] net: stmmac: allow drivers to explicitly select PHY device

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Message-ID: <CADvTj4rWvEaFyOm2HdNonASE4y1qoPoNgP_9n_ZbLCqAo1gGYw@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 28 May 2025 13:45:40 -0600
From: James Hilliard <james.hilliard1@...il.com>
To: Andrew Lunn <andrew@...n.ch>
Cc: "Russell King (Oracle)" <linux@...linux.org.uk>, wens@...e.org, netdev@...r.kernel.org, 
	linux-sunxi@...ts.linux.dev, Andrew Lunn <andrew+netdev@...n.ch>, 
	"David S. Miller" <davem@...emloft.net>, Eric Dumazet <edumazet@...gle.com>, 
	Jakub Kicinski <kuba@...nel.org>, Paolo Abeni <pabeni@...hat.com>, 
	Maxime Coquelin <mcoquelin.stm32@...il.com>, Alexandre Torgue <alexandre.torgue@...s.st.com>, 
	Furong Xu <0x1207@...il.com>, Kunihiko Hayashi <hayashi.kunihiko@...ionext.com>, 
	linux-stm32@...md-mailman.stormreply.com, 
	linux-arm-kernel@...ts.infradead.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 1/3] net: stmmac: allow drivers to explicitly select
 PHY device

On Wed, May 28, 2025 at 1:27 PM Andrew Lunn <andrew@...n.ch> wrote:
>
> > I think a lot of ethernet drivers use phy_find_first() for phy scanning
> > as well so it's not limited to just stmmac AFAIU.
>
> You need to differentiate by time. It has become a lot less used in
> the last decade. DT describes the PHY, so there is no need to hunt
> around for it. The only real use case now a days is USB dongles, which
> don't have DT, and maybe PCIe devices without ACPI support.

I mean, hardware probing features for this sort of use case have been
getting added outside the network subsystem so I'm not sure what the
issue with this is as those use cases don't appear to be meaningfully
different.

> I suggest you give up pushing this. You have two Maintainers saying no
> to this, so it is very unlikely you are going to succeed.

So what should I be doing instead? It's not clear to me what the issue
with this approach is as it appears to be a rather non-invasive change.

> I personally don't like depending on the bootloader. I often replace
> the bootloader, because it is a crippled version that does not let me
> TFTP boot, does not have flash enabled for saving configuration, and i
> want to use barebox etc. I think it is much better when Linux drives
> the hardware, not the bootloader.

As you said earlier we don't want to rely on the bootloader(which I agree
with), so it's unclear how we should support SoC's that require runtime
autodetection like this in the kernel.