[PATCH v2 1/3] net: stmmac: allow drivers to explicitly select PHY device

[Andrew Lunn]

On Wed, May 28, 2025 at 01:45:40PM -0600, James Hilliard wrote:
> On Wed, May 28, 2025 at 1:27 PM Andrew Lunn <andrew at lunn.ch> wrote:
> >
> > > I think a lot of ethernet drivers use phy_find_first() for phy scanning
> > > as well so it's not limited to just stmmac AFAIU.
> >
> > You need to differentiate by time. It has become a lot less used in
> > the last decade. DT describes the PHY, so there is no need to hunt
> > around for it. The only real use case now a days is USB dongles, which
> > don't have DT, and maybe PCIe devices without ACPI support.
> 
> I mean, hardware probing features for this sort of use case have been
> getting added outside the network subsystem so I'm not sure what the
> issue with this is as those use cases don't appear to be meaningfully
> different.
> 
> > I suggest you give up pushing this. You have two Maintainers saying no
> > to this, so it is very unlikely you are going to succeed.
> 
> So what should I be doing instead?

Describe the one PHY which actually exists in device tree for the
board, and point to it using phy-handle. No runtime detection, just
correctly describe the hardware.

Do you have examples of boards where the SoC variant changed during
the boards production life?

	Andrew