[PATCH 09/15] net: phy: delay PHY driver probe until PHY registration

[Russell King - ARM Linux admin]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 09:06:28AM -0700, Florian Fainelli wrote:
> On 6/24/2020 6:48 AM, Bartosz Golaszewski wrote:
> > I didn't expect to open such a can of worms...
> > 
> > This has evolved into several new concepts being proposed vs my
> > use-case which is relatively simple. The former will probably take
> > several months of development, reviews and discussions and it will
> > block supporting the phy supply on pumpkin boards upstream. I would
> > prefer not to redo what other MAC drivers do (phy-supply property on
> > the MAC node, controlling it from the MAC driver itself) if we've
> > already established it's wrong.
> 
> You are not new to Linux development, so none of this should come as a
> surprise to you. Your proposed solution has clearly short comings and is
> a hack, especially around the PHY_ID_NONE business to get a phy_device
> only then to have the real PHY device ID. You should also now that "I
> need it now because my product deliverable depends on it" has never been
> received as a valid argument to coerce people into accepting a solution
> for which there are at review time known deficiencies to the proposed
> approach.

It /is/ a generic issue.  The same problem exists for AMBA Primecell
devices, and that code has an internal deferred device list that it
manages.  See drivers/amba/bus.c, amba_deferred_retry_func(),
amba_device_try_add(), and amba_device_add().

As we see more devices gain this property, it needs to be addressed
in a generic way, rather than coming up with multiple bus specific
implementations.

Maybe struct bus_type needs a method to do the preparation to add
a device (such as reading IDs etc), which is called by device_add().
If that method returns -EPROBE_DEFER, the device gets added to a
deferred list, which gets retried when drivers are successfully
probed.  Possible maybe?

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