Re: bitrot in drivers/net/au1000_eth.c

[Matt Porter <mporter@kernel.crashing.org>]

On Fri, Jan 28, 2005 at 09:01:36AM -0800, Pete Popov wrote:
> Ulrich Eckhardt wrote:

<snip>

> > 3. Split off the MII handling code or, better, reuse the facility already 
> > provided by drivers/net/mii.c. This would mean a significant rewrite of 
> > au1x00.c, including probably breaking things on the way.
> 
> That's a possibility too but more code needs to be added to mii.c. I 
> actually revisited the code yesterday and was trying to figure out 
> how to clean it up. But someone told me that there is 2.6 work in 
> progress to do this so I decided to just wait. Maybe someone knows 
> more about it.

I suggest everyone take a look at the effort posted to netdev:

http://oss.sgi.com/archives/netdev/2004-12/msg00643.html

It's an attempt at a phy abstraction layer that goes the next
logical step after the minimal support provided in mii.h.

It's evolved out of the in-driver abstraction that is currently
used in the sungem, ibm_emac, and gianfar drivers in 2.6. It
was just a matter of time before somebody got tired of copying
the same PHY mgmt bits into every driver. :)

-Matt