Re: [PATCH 01/15] drivers: phy: add generic PHY framework

[Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com>]

Hi Arnd,
On Thursday 25 July 2013 13:00:49 Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> On Thursday 25 July 2013, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > On Wednesday 24 July 2013 20:32:03 Arnd Bergmann wrote:
> > > On Tuesday 23 July 2013, Tomasz Figa wrote:
> > > > On Tuesday 23 of July 2013 17:14:20 Alan Stern wrote:
> > > > > On Tue, 23 Jul 2013, Tomasz Figa wrote:
> > > > > > Where would you want to have those phy_address arrays stored?
> > > > > > There are no board files when booting with DT. Not even saying
> > > > > > that you don't need to use any hacky schemes like this when you
> > > > > > have DT that nicely specifies relations between devices.
> > > > > 
> > > > > If everybody agrees DT has a nice scheme for specifying relations
> > > > > between devices, why not use that same scheme in the PHY core?
> > > > 
> > > > It is already used, for cases when consumer device has a DT node
> > > > attached. In non-DT case this kind lookup translates loosely to
> > > > something that is being done in regulator framework - you can't bind
> > > > devices by pointers, because you don't have those pointers, so you
> > > > need to use device names.
> > > 
> > > Sorry for jumping in to the middle of the discussion, but why does a new
> > > framework even bother defining an interface for board files?
> > > 
> > > Can't we just drop any interfaces for platform data passing in the phy
> > > framework and put the burden of adding those to anyone who actually
> > > needs them? All the platforms we are concerned with here (exynos and
> > > omap, plus new platforms) can be booted using DT anyway.
> > 
> > What about non-DT architectures such as MIPS (still widely used in
> > consumer networking equipments from what I've heard) ?
> 
> * Vendors of such equipment have started moving on to ARM (e.g. Broadcom
> bcm47xx)
> * Some of the modern MIPS platforms are now using DT
> * Legacy platforms probably won't migrate to either DT or the generic PHY
> framework
> 
> I'm not saying that we can't support legacy board files with the common PHY
> framework, but I'd expect things to be much easier if we focus on those
> platforms that are actively being worked on for now, to bring an end to the
> pointless API discussion.

Fair enough :-)

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart