Re: [PATCH net-next v8 01/15] Documentation: ACPI: DSD: Document MDIO PHY

[Rafael J. Wysocki]

On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 8:23 PM Grant Likely <grant.likely@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On 10/06/2021 19:05, Rafael J. Wysocki wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 6:40 PM Ioana Ciornei <ciorneiioana@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >>
> >> From: Calvin Johnson <calvin.johnson@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> >>
> >> Introduce ACPI mechanism to get PHYs registered on a MDIO bus and
> >> provide them to be connected to MAC.
> >
> > This is not an "ACPI mechanism", because it is not part of the ACPI
> > specification or support documentation thereof.
> >
> > I would call it "a mechanism based on generic ACPI _DSD device
> > properties definition []1]".  And provide a reference to the _DSD
> > properties definition document.
> >
> > With that changed, you can add
> >
> > Acked-by: Rafael J. Wysocki <rafael@xxxxxxxxxx>
> >
> > to this patch.
> >
> > Note, however, that within the traditional ACPI framework, the _DSD
> > properties are consumed by the driver that binds to the device
> > represented by the ACPI device object containing the _DSD in question
> > in its scope, while in this case IIUC the properties are expected to
> > be consumed by the general networking code in the kernel.  That is not
> > wrong in principle, but it means that operating systems other than
> > Linux are not likely to be using them.
> >
>
> Doesn't this land at the level of device drivers though? None of this
> data needs to be consumed by the OS generic ACPI parsing code, but the
> network device driver can use it to parse the MDIO and MAC configuraiton
> and set itself up appropriately.

That's right in general, which is why I said that doing it this way
wasn't wrong.