Re: [RFC PATCH v3 net-next 09/10] net: dsa: ocelot: felix: add support for VSC75XX control over SPI

[Vladimir Oltean]

On Sat, Aug 14, 2021 at 02:43:29PM +0300, Vladimir Oltean wrote:
> The issue is that the registers for the PCS1G block look nothing like
> the MDIO clause 22 layout, so anything that tries to map the struct
> ocelot_pcs over a struct mdio_device is going to look like a horrible
> shoehorn.
> 
> For that we might need Russell's assistance.
> 
> The documentation is at:
> http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/VMDS-10489.pdf
> search for "Information about the registers for this product is available in the attached file."
> and then open the PDF embedded within the PDF.

In fact I do notice now that as long as you don't use any of the
optional phylink_mii_c22_pcs_* helpers in your PCS driver, then
struct phylink_pcs has pretty much zero dependency on struct mdio_device,
which means that I'm wrong and it should be completely within reach to
write a dedicated PCS driver for this hardware.

As to how to make the common felix.c work with different implementations
of struct phylink_pcs, one thing that certainly has to change is that
struct felix should hold a struct phylink_pcs **pcs and not a
struct lynx_pcs **pcs.

Does this mean that we should refactor lynx_pcs_create() to return a
struct phylink_pcs * instead of struct lynx_pcs *, and lynx_pcs_destroy()
to receive the struct phylink_pcs *, use container_of() and free the
larger struct lynx_pcs *? Yes, probably.

If you feel uncomfortable with this, I can try to refactor lynx_pcs to
make it easier to accomodate a different PCS driver in felix.