Re: [PATCH 0/2] net: stmmac: allow sharing MDIO lines

[Bartosz Golaszewski]

On Mon, Aug 7, 2023 at 9:50 PM Andrew Lunn <andrew@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Aug 07, 2023 at 09:31:00PM +0200, Bartosz Golaszewski wrote:
> > From: Bartosz Golaszewski <bartosz.golaszewski@xxxxxxxxxx>
> >
> > Two MACs may share MDIO lines to the PHYs. Let's allow that in the
> > stmmac driver by providing a new device-tree property allowing one MAC
> > node to reference the MDIO bus defined on a second MAC node.
>
> I don't understand why this is needed. phy-handle can point to a phy
> on any MDIO bus. So it is no problem for one MAC to point to the other
> MACs MDIO bus as is.
>
> You do sometimes get into ordering problems, especially if MAC0 is
> pointing to a PHY on MAC1 MDIO bus. But MAC0 should get a
> -EPROBE_DEFER, MAC1 then probes, creating its MDIO bus and the two
> PHYs on it, and then later MAC0 is probes again and is successful.
>
>      Andrew

Ok so upon some further investigation, the actual culprit is in stmmac
platform code - it always tries to register an MDIO bus - independent
of whether there is an actual mdio child node - unless the MAC is
marked explicitly as having a fixed-link.

When I fixed that, MAC1's probe is correctly deferred until MAC0 has
created the MDIO bus.

Even so, isn't it useful to actually reference the shared MDIO bus in some way?

If the schematics look something like this:

--------           -------
| MAC0 |--MDIO-----| PHY |
-------- |     |   -------
         |     |
-------- |     |   -------
| MAC1 |--     ----| PHY |
--------           -------

Then it would make sense to model it on the device tree?

Anyway, this can be discussed later, I will drop this for now and send
a fix for stmmac mdio code instead to get this upstream.

Bart