Re: [PATCH] net: dsa: MxL862xx: don't force-enable MAXLINEAR_GPHY

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Sat, Feb 21, 2026, at 02:25, Guenter Roeck wrote:
> On 2/16/26 08:27, Arnd Bergmann wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 16, 2026, at 17:22, Daniel Golle wrote:
>>> On Mon, Feb 16, 2026 at 08:20:41AM -0800, Guenter Roeck wrote:
>> 
>> What I meant above is that I had considered and rejected the extra
>> dependencies in the ethernet driver. I don't think there is a good
>> way to add inline helpers. Technically, one could use IS_REACHABLE()
>> here, to stub out the functions when the caller is built-in, but
>> I find that even worse because it replaces a trivial build-time
>> failure with very subtle runtime bug.
>> 
>
> Lots of kernel APIs have dummy implementations. hwmon isn't really that
> different to those. Also, arguably, that would not be a subtle runtime
> bug but a feature.

I would argue that all of them are wrong. I currently count 33 uses
of IS_REACHABLE() in header files, which is not a lot, but I would
prefer replacing these with proper Kconfig dependencies than to
add more for cases we already handle correctly.

     Arnd