Re: [PATCH net-next RFC V1 5/5] net: mdio: Add a driver for InES time stamping IP core.

[Richard Cochran <richardcochran@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Mar 25, 2018 at 04:01:49PM -0700, Florian Fainelli wrote:
> The best that I can think about and it still is a hack in some way, is
> to you have your time stamping driver create a proxy mii_bus whose
> purpose is just to hook to mdio/phy_device events (such as link changes)
> in order to do what is necessary, or at least, this would indicate its
> transparent nature towards the MDIO/MDC lines...

That won't work at all, AFAICT.  There is only one mii_bus per netdev,
that is one that is attached to the phydev.
 
> Tangential: the existing PHY time stamping logic should probably be
> generalized to a mdio_device (which the phy_device is a specialized
> superset of) instead of to the phy_device. This would still allow
> existing use cases but it would also allow us to support possible "pure
> MDIO" devices would that become some thing in the future.

So this is exactly what I did.  The time stamping methods were pushed
down into the mdio_device.  The active device (mdiots pointer) points
either to a non-PHY mdio_device or to the mdio_device embedded in the
phydev.

Thanks,
Richard