Re: [EXT] Re: [PATCH] bus: fsl-mc: Add ACPI support for fsl-mc

[Jon Nettleton]

On Fri, Jan 31, 2020 at 4:09 PM Andrew Lunn <andrew@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > Devicetree to the rescue!
>
> Yes, exactly. We have good, standardised descriptions for most of this
> in device tree. And phylink can handle SFP and SFP+. Nobody has worked
> on QSFP yet, since phylink has mostly been pushed by the embedded
> world and 40G is not yet popular in the embedded world.
>
> > Entertaining the use of ACPI without any firmware abstraction for this
> > hardware really feels like a square peg / round hole situation, so I'm
> > assuming somebody's telling you that you need it "FOAR ENTAPRYZE". Who
> > is it and can you tell them to bog off?
>
> The issues here is that SFPs are appearing in more and more server
> systems, replacing plain old copper Ethernet. If the boxes use off the
> shelf Mellanox or Intel PCIe cards, it is not an issue. But silicon
> vendors are integrating this into the SoC in the ARM way of doing
> things, memory mapped, spread over a number of controllers, not a
> single PCIe device.
>
> Maybe we need hybrid systems. Plain, old, simple, boring things like
> CPUs, serial ports, SATA, PCIe busses are described in ACPI. Complex
> interesting things are in DT. The hard thing is the interface between
> the two. DT having a phandle to an ACPI object, e.g a GPIO, interrupt
> or an i2c bus.
>
>    Andrew

Just as a review reference, I have found an old attempted
implementation documented here.
https://github.com/CumulusNetworks/apd-tools/wiki

-Jon