[PATCH net-next 5/6] arm64: dts: marvell: mcbin: enable the fourth network interface

[Marcin Wojtas]

Hi Russell and Stefan,

2017-12-29 12:38 GMT+01:00 Russell King - ARM Linux <linux at armlinux.org.uk>:
> On Fri, Dec 29, 2017 at 12:12:15PM +0100, Marcin Wojtas wrote:
>> Hi Russell,
>>
>> I see that I misspelled your email address, hence the series remained unnoticed:
>> https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/18/216
>>
>> In terms of the phylink support, I think the most important are:
>> * 3/8
>> https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/18/211
>> * 7/8
>> https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/18/207
>>
>> I think the way of obtaining PHY fwnode and connecting it from the
>> latter patch could be incorporated to the phylink code. Although I
>> didn't get much feedback, the whole ACPI-handling of MDIO bus and the
>> PHYs touch ACPI specification and I expect it a slower to get merged.
>> Hence my idea is following:
>> * Send v2 with ACPI supporting link-irq only in mvpp2.c
>> * Extract MDIO bus handling for ACPI and propose PHY handling
>> modifications in phylink.
>>
>> This way we may push the two things forwards in more efficient way.
>> I'm looking forward to your opinion.
>
> Agreed - as we have very few users of phylink at the moment (they're
> mostly all in external trees) we can easily change the phylink
> interfaces.  The first step is solving the ACPI representation of the
> MDIO bus and attached devices, and until that is settled, not much can
> be done.
>
> However, it seems to me that the issues of adding ACPI to mvpp2 vs
> adding phylink to mvpp2 are two entirely separate problems that don't
> really conflict with each other - since the "phy" problem afflicts
> both.
>

Yes, I already split the series and will send first one right away. I
will be followed by MDIO bus / PHY handling proposal, including the
bits related to phylink. I'm looking forward to your opinion on that
once sent.

> However, I'm not sure what this "link-irq" thing is that you talk
> about (and I suspect it's one of the things that I've been trying for
> months to find out about from Antoine when he says that there's stuff
> that mvpp2 supports that phylink doesn't.)  So, I'm left to guess, and
> I guess it's the mvpp2-variant of mvneta's in-band autonegotiation.
> Continuing to guess from the mvpp2 phylink conversion patch, this mvpp2
> variant is selected by not providing a phy handle in DT, whereas
> mvneta's variant is selected using the ethernet-standard property
> 'managed = "in-band-status"'.

This my understanding of how the PP2 HW works in terms of signalling
the link interrupt:

The full in-band management, similar to mvneta is supported only in
the SGMII mode (1G, not sure how it looks like in 2.5G mode). Such
handling is not yet implemented in the mvpp2.c

10G:
The XGMII MAC (XLG) is capable of generating link status change
interrupt upon information provided from the reconciliation layer (RS)
of the interface.

2.5G/1G SGMII:
Apart from the in-band management, the MAC is also capable of
generating IRQ during link-status change.

1G RGMII:
I was a bit surprised, but checked on my own - the link change IRQ can
be generated here as well.

In addition to above the clause 22 PHYs can be automatically polled
via SMI bus and provide complete information about link status, speed,
etc., reflecting it directly in GMAC status registers. However, this
feature had to be disabled, in order not to conflict with SW PHY
management of the phylib.

Stefan, is above correct?

>
> If my guessing is correct, I have to wonder why mvpp2 invented a
> different way to represent this from mvneta?  This makes it much more
> difficult to convert mvpp2 to phylink, and it also makes it difficult
> to add SFP support ignoring the phylink issue (since there is no phy
> handle there either.)

Doesn't SFP require the fwnode handle to the sfp node? This is what I
understand at least from the phylink_register_sfp.

Anyway, once the phylink is introduced in mvpp2.c, its presence will
simply be detected by port->phylink pointer. In such case the link IRQ
will no be used. In longer perspective, link IRQ should be used only
by ACPI and once MDIO bus is supported in generic way in this world,
it could remain as the 'last resort' option.

Best regards,
Marcin