Date:   Fri, 13 May 2022 17:39:24 -0700
From:   Saravana Kannan <saravanak@...gle.com>
To:     Vladimir Oltean <vladimir.oltean@....com>
Cc:     netdev@...r.kernel.org, Jakub Kicinski <kuba@...nel.org>,
        "David S. Miller" <davem@...emloft.net>,
        Paolo Abeni <pabeni@...hat.com>,
        Eric Dumazet <edumazet@...gle.com>,
        Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@...il.com>,
        Vivien Didelot <vivien.didelot@...il.com>,
        Andrew Lunn <andrew@...n.ch>,
        Vladimir Oltean <olteanv@...il.com>,
        devicetree@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>,
        "Rafael J. Wysocki" <rafael@...nel.org>,
        Robin Murphy <robin.murphy@....com>,
        Geert Uytterhoeven <geert+renesas@...der.be>,
        Rob Herring <robh+dt@...nel.org>,
        Frank Rowand <frowand.list@...il.com>,
        John Stultz <jstultz@...gle.com>,
        Alvin Šipraga <alsi@...g-olufsen.dk>,
        Russell King <rmk+kernel@...linux.org.uk>,
        Heiner Kallweit <hkallweit1@...il.com>
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH net 0/2] Make phylink and DSA wait for PHY driver that
 defers probe

On Fri, May 13, 2022 at 4:37 PM Vladimir Oltean <vladimir.oltean@....com> wrote:
>
> This patch set completes the picture described by
> '[RFC,devicetree] of: property: mark "interrupts" as optional for fw_devlink'
> https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/netdevbpf/patch/20220513201243.2381133-1-vladimir.oltean@nxp.com/

I replied to that patch. I don't think we can pull that in.

> I've CCed non-networking maintainers just in case they want to gain a
> better understanding. If not, apologies and please ignore the rest.
>
>
>
> My use case is to migrate a PHY driver from poll mode to interrupt mode
> without breaking compatibility between new device trees and old kernels
> which did not have a driver for that IRQ parent, and therefore (for
> things to work) did not even have that interrupt listed in the "vintage
> correct" DT blobs. Note that current kernels as of today are also
> "old kernels" in this description.
>
> Creating some degree of compatibility has multiple components.
>
> 1. A PHY driver must eventually give up waiting for an IRQ provider,
>    since the dependency is optional and it can fall back to poll mode.
>    This is currently supported thanks to commit 74befa447e68 ("net:
>    mdio: don't defer probe forever if PHY IRQ provider is missing").
>
> 2. Before it finally gives up, the PHY driver has a transient phase of
>    returning -EPROBE_DEFER. That transient phase causes some breakage
>    which is handled by this patch set, details below.
>
> 3. PHY device probing and Ethernet controller finding it and connecting
>    to it are async events. When both happen during probing, the problem
>    is that finding the PHY fails if the PHY defers probe, which results
>    in a missing PHY rather than waiting for it. Unfortunately there is
>    no universal way to address this problem, because the majority of
>    Ethernet drivers do not connect to the PHY during probe. So the
>    problem is fixed only for the driver that is of interest to me in
>    this context, DSA, and with special API exported by phylink
>    specifically for this purpose, to limit the impact on other drivers.

I'll take a closer look at this later this week, but once we add
phy-handle support to fw_devlink (the device_bind_driver() is making
it hard to add support), I think we can address most/all of these
problems automatically. So hopefully we can work towards that?
Actually this patch might already fix this for you:
https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20220429220933.1350374-1-saravanak@google.com/

Before fw_devlink, we'd give up on waiting on all suppliers, whether
they had a driver (but hadn't yet probed for a multitude of reasons)
or not. fw_devlink is smart about allowing consumers to probe without
their suppliers only if the supplier has no driver or the driver fails
(I'll send a patch for this). The deferred_probe_timeout is what's
used to decide when to give up waiting for drivers.

-Saravana

>
> Note that drivers that connect to the PHY at ndo_open are superficially
> "fixed" by the patch at step 1 alone, and therefore don't need the
> mechanism introduced in phylink here. This is because of the larger span
> of time between PHY probe and opening the network interface (typically
> initiated by user space). But this is the catch, nfsroot and other
> in-kernel networking users can also open the net device, and this will
> still expose the EPROBE_DEFER as a hard error for this second kind of
> drivers. I don't know how to fix that. From this POV, it's better to do
> what DSA does (connect to the PHY on probe).
>
> Vladimir Oltean (2):
>   net: phylink: allow PHY driver to defer probe when connecting via OF
>     node
>   net: dsa: wait for PHY to defer probe
>
>  drivers/net/phy/phylink.c | 73 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++---------
>  include/linux/phylink.h   |  2 ++
>  net/dsa/dsa2.c            |  2 ++
>  net/dsa/port.c            |  6 ++--
>  net/dsa/slave.c           | 10 +++---
>  5 files changed, 70 insertions(+), 23 deletions(-)
>
> --
> 2.25.1
>

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