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

[Yegor Yefremov <yegorslists@googlemail.com>]

On Tue, Mar 11, 2014 at 9:39 PM, David Miller <davem@davemloft.net> wrote:
> From: Yegor Yefremov <yegorslists@googlemail.com>
> Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 21:11:16 +0100
>
>> On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 7:00 PM, David Miller <davem@davemloft.net> wrote:
>>> From: Stefan Roese <sr@denx.de>
>>> Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 10:32:20 +0100
>>>
>>>> On 27.02.2014 23:02, David Miller wrote:
>>>>> From: Stefan Roese <sr@denx.de>
>>>>> Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2014 10:07:52 +0100
>>>>>
>>>>> Better is to come up with a real, types, interface for programming
>>>>> such devices and providing an implementation of that.
>>>>
>>>> Right. Such a thing would be better. But as Florian already pointed
>>>> out, nothing like this is available in kernel.org right now. Thats the
>>>> reason why I chose to implement this "simple" driver, btw as done in
>>>> drivers/net/phy/spi_ks8995.c.
>>>
>>> When a suitable user facing interface is lacking, you create one
>>> and submit it for review here.  You don't just submit adhoc driver
>>> local stuff.
>>
>> David, what about enabling ethtool to read/write from/to the PHY
>> registers (via passing PHY ID and register number)? I'm trying to get
>> ICplus IP175D running and it has lots of registers, that I would like
>> to look at dynamically.
>
> For debugging, register dumps are already supported by ethtool.

Do you mean 'ethtool -e' option? AFAIK it dumps Ethernet controller
regs, if it implements ethtool_ops.get_regs(). What I need are PHY
registers, that I can get via MII interface. ethtool should provide
access to PHY registers like mdiobus_read() and mdiobus_write()
routines. Another option were to add get_regs() to 'struct
phy_driver', but in this case one won't be able to write to the
registers.

Yegor