Re: [PATCH RFC net-next 00/15] net: stmmac: rk: cleanups galore

Andrew Lunn
2025-12-01T15:55:47Z

> One of the interesting things is that this appears to deal with RGMII
> delays at the MAC end of the link, but there's no way to tell phylib
> that's the case. I've not looked deeply into what is going on there,
> but it is surprising that the driver insists that the delays (in
> register values?) are provided, but then ignores them depending on the
> exact RGMII mode selected.

Yes, many Rockchip .dts files use phy-mode = 'rgmii', and then do the
delays in the MAC. I've been pushing back on this for a while now, and
in most cases, it is possible to set the delays to 0, and use
'rgmii-id'.

Unfortunately, the vendor version of the driver comes with a debugfs
interface which puts the PHY into loopback, and then steps through the
different delay values to find the range of values which result in no
packet loss. The vendor documentation then recommends
phy-mode='rgmii', and set the delays to the middle value for this
range. So the vendor is leading developers up the garden path.

These delay values also appear to be magical. There has been at least
one attempt to reverse engineer the values back to ns, but it was not
possible to get consistent results across a collection of boards.

Andrew