Re: [PATCH net-next v2 00/11] net: pcs: Add support for devices probed in the "usual" manner

Vladimir Oltean
2022-11-09T22:59:52Z

On Thu, Nov 03, 2022 at 05:06:39PM -0400, Sean Anderson wrote:
> For a long time, PCSs have been tightly coupled with their MACs. For
> this reason, the MAC creates the "phy" or mdio device, and then passes
> it to the PCS to initialize. This has a few disadvantages:
>
> - Each MAC must re-implement the same steps to look up/create a PCS
> - The PCS cannot use functions tied to device lifetime, such as devm_*.
> - Generally, the PCS does not have easy access to its device tree node

Is there a clear need to solve these disadvantages? There comes extra
runtime complexity with the PCS-as-device scheme (plus the extra
complexity needed to address the DT backwards compatibility problems
it causes; not addressed here).