Am 21.11.2017 um 02:34 schrieb Andrew Lunn: > Hi Heiner > > Do you have access to the data sheet? > > I had a quick look through the driver. It would be nice to refactor it > to follow the usual Linux conventions: > > Turn the MDIO read/write functions into an MDIO bus driver. > > Move the PHY code into drivers/net/phy/realtek.c, and in the process, > replace all the magic numbers with #defines. > > Do you have any interest in doing this? > > Andrew > Hi Andrew,
I worked a little on this topic and meanwhile have an experimental patch set for switching the driver to phylib, incl. MDIO bus driver. It works well on a RTL8168evl (RTL_GIGA_MAC_VER_34). Will submit this patch set as RfC in the next days. Still open is factoring out all phy init stuff to drivers/net/phy. There are open issues where I would appreciate advice from the Realtek guys. The PHY in RTL8168evl identifies as RTL8211E. Question would be whether such an internal PHY with this id is identical to an external PHY with the same id. For most NIC's the driver loads firmware. The firmware can refer to PHY and MAC as well. In case of RTL8168evl the firmware (rtl8168e-3.fw) seems to be for the PHY only. So next question is whether this firmware would be applicable for any RTL8211E external PHY too. In this case one option would be to move the firmware handling to drivers/firmware so that it can be used from PHY drivers and from NIC drivers as well. Regards, Heiner
