netdev - Re: Re: [Question] Return value of mii

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Message-ID: <aSARjLeqFjHKvrem@debianbuilder>
Date: Fri, 21 Nov 2025 08:15:24 +0100
From: Buday Csaba <buday.csaba@...lan.hu>
To: Heiner Kallweit <hkallweit1@...il.com>
CC: <netdev@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: Re: [Question] Return value of mii_bus->write()

On Fri, Nov 21, 2025 at 07:53:21AM +0100, Heiner Kallweit wrote:
> On 11/21/2025 7:31 AM, Buday Csaba wrote:
> > I am preparing a patch to eliminate kernel-doc warnings in mdio_device.c
> > and mdio_bus.c
> > 
> > I have ran into an ambiguity: what is mii_bus->write() supposed to
> > return on success? Documentation/networking/phy.txt does not give any
> > information about it, neither does the kdoc in include/linux/phy.h.
> > 
> > It is clear that 0 is treated as success, and a negative indicates
> > failure. The reference implementation also follows this convention.
> > But the code in mdio_bus.c, for example: __mdiobus_modify_changed(),
> > seems to also expect positive return values from write().
> > 
> I think you misread the code. __mdiobus_modify_changed() returns
> a positive value in case new and old value differ, but __mdiobus_write()
> never returns a positive value.
> 

That is right, thank you!
Csaba