Re: [RFC PATCH net-next] net: phy: rust: add experimental Davicom PHY driver

[Muchamad Coirul Anwar]

Hi Andrew,

On Wed, Mar 11, 2026 at 20:36 Andrew Lunn <andrew@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> That is not really how Linux works. The Maintainers don't go out
> searching for hardware which should be supported. Developers come to
> us with patches.
>
> One place you might look is Openwrt. They often have drivers for
> hardware which never make it upstream to Mainline. Take such a driver,
> buy the hardware, and port it to Rust. But please make sure it is
> really a new device, not just a variant of an existing family of
> devices which already has a driver.

Thank you for the excellent pointer regarding OpenWrt. I wasn't fully
aware of how many out-of-tree drivers are maintained there out of
necessity.

I will spend the next week researching the OpenWrt source tree for
unsupported PHY chips. My goal is to find a device that strictly meets
three criteria: it is a genuinely new chip (not a variant), the
hardware is physically purchasable, and the register datasheet is
publicly available without an NDA.

If hardware availability or closed documentation proves to be a hard
blocker after this timeboxed research, I will likely pivot to other
subsystems (such as IIO or hwmon) where hardware documentation is
generally more open, to continue my Rust driver contributions.

I will drop this Davicom RFC for now. Thank you again for your time,
review, and for pointing me in the right direction. It has been
incredibly helpful.

Best regards,

Muchamad Coirul Anwar