Re: [PATCH net-next] net: phy: switch drivers to use dynamic feature detection

[Heiner Kallweit <hkallweit1@gmail.com>]

On 07.04.2019 22:31, Florian Fainelli wrote:
> 
> 
> On 4/7/2019 2:57 AM, Heiner Kallweit wrote:
>> Recently genphy_read_abilities() has been added that dynamically detects
>> clause 22 PHY abilities. I *think* this detection should work with all
>> supported PHY's, at least for the ones with basic features sets, i.e.
>> PHY_BASIC_FEATURES and PHY_GBIT_FEATURES. So let's remove setting these
>> features explicitly and rely on phylib feature detection.
>>
>> I don't have access to most of these PHY's, therefore I'd appreciate
>> regression testing.
> 
> The nice thing about the features is that we can right away tell which
> PHY entries are Fast Ethernet/Gigabit etc... so if you remove that
> assignment, we would need at least a standardized comment allowing us to
> quickly grep for that information.
> 
Yes, that gets lost. Well, in a lot (most?) of cases you still have it in
the name. But who needs this information what for? At runtime e.g. ethtool
tells what's supported. And for all PHY's w/o dedicated driver that are
using the genphy driver you don't know anyway.
For c45 PHY's this would become even more tricky as they can support much
more speeds.