Old regression possibly affecting many devices with build options in Kconfig files

[Dario <dario86@tutamail.com>]

Hello,

On 2017/02/07 commit af2cbfd6b982f7a52414ea50b2ece0290d4b748f broke gigabit ethernet for Olimex A20-OLinuXino-LIME2. This commit likely prevents the activation of the option CONFIG_RTL8211X_PHY_FORCE_MASTER needed for proper gigabit networking on this device. Since the only modification introduced by this commit was moving Kconfig files, I suspect this change may affect many more devices as well for which proper build options may not be enabled.

Apart from how this went unnoticed for such a long time, what really puzzles me is commit 8728c97eff5bd95f58320f886ae305f17931a374 submitted on 2017/03/13 which removes CONFIG_RTL8211X_PHY_FORCE_MASTER from configs/A20-OLinuXino-Lime2_defconfig altogether.

I think it is not by chance that Arch Linux ARM kept the package uboot-a20-olinuxino-lime2 at version 2017.01-2 which is the last working version before the aforementioned commit broke gigabit ethernet for this board.

My A20-OLinuXino-Lime2 is the only device I have available for testing. My fear is that many more devices may be affected since this same option was removed from A20-Olimex-SOM-EVB_defconfig as well along with several other options from many other devices.