Re: [PATCH] net: phy: Add support for SMSC/Microchip LAN9303 3-port switch

[Yegor Yefremov <yegorslists@googlemail.com>]

Hi Florian,

On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 11:21 PM, Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@gmail.com> wrote:
> 2014-02-27 14:02 GMT-08:00 David Miller <davem@davemloft.net>:
>> From: Stefan Roese <sr@denx.de>
>> Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2014 10:07:52 +0100
>>
>>> This driver exposes a sysfs interface to access the LAN9303 registers to
>>> userspace. These sysfs files can be used to configure the switch.
>>>
>>> Signed-off-by: Stefan Roese <sr@denx.de>
>>
>> We have an abstraction for programming switch devices called DSA.
>>
>> Even if DSA doesn't fullfill your needs, doing adjustments using sysfs
>> files in userland is going to be the worst user experience possible.
>
> If you remember the discussion that started around the 'swconfig'
> patches, DSA is not suitable for all types of switches, especially not
> those which have no proprietary tagging support (which are about 80%
> of the switches used in embedded systems). That discussion has kind of
> stalled now, so we should probably bring it back...
>
>>
>> Every driver will export different things to tweak, each device will
>> have different semantics and limitations for these settings, etc.
>>
>> Better is to come up with a real, types, interface for programming
>> such devices and providing an implementation of that.
>
> These are definitively the goals of the 'swconfig' patches that were
> posted a while ago, to provide an unified programming API.
> --
> Florian
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Have you tried to apply your swconfig patches to 3.14? There some
compiler errors meanwhile. genl_register_ops() is not available, so
one has to switch to genl_register_family_with_ops() or similar
macros. It would be great, if you could post the updates series and if
possible with ICplus drive included.

Yegor