Re: [PATCH v3 2/3] net: ethernet: actions: Add Actions Semi Owl Ethernet MAC driver

[Amit Tomer]

Hi,

> > Do you know the story behind this Ethernet controller?
>
> I just happened to get a board based on the S500 SoC, so I took this
> opportunity to help improving the mainline kernel support, but other
> than that I do not really know much about the hardware history.
>
> > The various
> > receive/transmit descriptor definitions are 99% those defined in
> > drivers/net/ethernet/stmmicro/stmmac/descs.h for the normal descriptor.
>
> That's an interesting observation. I could only assume the vendor did
> not want to reinvent the wheel here, but I cannot say if this is a
> common design scheme or is something specific to STMicroelectronics
> only.

I am not entirely sure about it but it looks like it *may* only need
to have a glue driver to
connect to DWMAC.
For instance, on the U-boot[1] side (S700 is one of 64bit OWL SoC from
actions), we kind of re-uses already
existing DWMAC and provide a glue code, and on the Linux side as well
have some similar implementation (locally).

Thanks
-Amit.

[1]: https://source.denx.de/u-boot/u-boot/-/blob/master/drivers/net/dwmac_s700.c