I have an older PPC 405GP board with a 2.6.33 kernel that fails to 
install a eth0 instance because the phy probe fails when there is no 
good ethernet link.
I have looked at the latest kernel code and it seems just about the same 
in this area, but I have not tried it.

Does anyone else still have a 405GP board to try and see if eth0 comes 
up with not enet cable?

I tried to probe the phy earlier and skip the emac_configure() call in 
emac_init_phy() to avoid doing the MR0_SRST bit set.
But the phy read still times out.

I then went with this approach to re-call emac_init_phy() after the 
emac_reset() finally completes when a cable is plugged in.
Does anyone else have any ideas why the phy probe fails on the first pass?