Re: [PATCH net-next 0/3] net: phy: add support for disabling autonomous EEE

Andrew Lunn
2026-04-06T13:17:24Z

On Mon, Apr 06, 2026 at 09:13:06AM +0200, Nicolai Buchwitz wrote:
> Some PHYs implement autonomous EEE where the PHY manages EEE
> independently

I suppose we should discuss naming. As far as i know, IEEE 802.3 does
not include this feature, so it does not provide a guide to how we
should name it.

In the past we have used SmartEEE, but that is Atheros's vendor
name. Broadcom seem to call it AutoGrEEEn.

Autonomous EEE seems like a reasonable name, and appears to be vendor
agnostic. Are we happy with this?

What i guess is unclear is what part of the network stack is acting
autonomously. In the context of a PHY driver op,
.disable_autonomous_eee is clear. But when we go further to actually
making use of it, do we need to report to user space if we are using
IEEE 802.3 EEE or "autonomous EEE". But i guess it is no worse than
SmartEEE or AutoGrEEEn which also make no indication where EEE is
happening.

Thoughts?

Andrew