From: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>
Date: Wed, 14 Jan 2026 02:52:37 +0000 (-0800)
Subject: Merge branch 'net-phy-introduce-phy-ports-representation'
X-Git-Url: http://git.ipfire.org/cgi-bin/gitweb.cgi?a=commitdiff_plain;h=75fe2b7adc2e9359357184b9eb17f0cff3ba46d8;p=thirdparty%2Fkernel%2Flinux.git

Merge branch 'net-phy-introduce-phy-ports-representation'

Maxime Chevallier says:

====================
net: phy: Introduce PHY ports representation

A few important notes:

 - This is only a first phase. It instantiates the port, and leverage
   that to make the MAC <-> PHY <-> SFP usecase simpler.

 - Next phase will deal with controlling the port state, as well as the
   netlink uAPI for that.

 - The end-goal is to enable support for complex port MUX. This
   preliminary work focuses on PHY-driven ports, but this will be
   extended to support muxing at the MII level (Multi-phy, or compo PHY
   + SFP as found on Turris Omnia for example).

 - The naming is definitely not set in stone. I named that "phy_port",
   but this may convey the false sense that this is phylib-specific.
   Even the word "port" is not that great, as it already has several
   different meanings in the net world (switch port, devlink port,
   etc.). I used the term "connector" in the binding.

A bit of history on that work :

The end goal that I personnaly want to achieve is :

            + PHY - RJ45
            |
 MAC - MUX -+ PHY - RJ45

After many discussions here on netdev@, but also at netdevconf[1] and
LPC[2], there appears to be several analoguous designs that exist out
there.

[1] : https://netdevconf.info/0x17/sessions/talk/improving-multi-phy-and-multi-port-interfaces.html
[2] : https://lpc.events/event/18/contributions/1964/ (video isn't the
right one)

Take the MAchiatobin, it has 2 interfaces that looks like this :

 MAC - PHY -+ RJ45
            |
	    + SFP - Whatever the module does

Now, looking at the Turris Omnia, we have :

 MAC - MUX -+ PHY - RJ45
            |
	    + SFP - Whatever the module does

We can find more example of this kind of designs, the common part is
that we expose multiple front-facing media ports. This is what this
current work aims at supporting. As of right now, it does'nt add any
support for muxing, but this will come later on.

This first phase focuses on phy-driven ports only, but there are already
quite some challenges already. For one, we can't really autodetect how
many ports are sitting behind a PHY. That's why this series introduces a
new binding. Describing ports in DT should however be a last-resort
thing when we need to clear some ambiguity about the PHY media-side.

The only use-cases that we have today for multi-port PHYs are combo PHYs
that drive both a Copper port and an SFP (the Macchiatobin case). This
in itself is challenging and this series only addresses part of this
support, by registering a phy_port for the PHY <-> SFP connection. The
SFP module should in the end be considered as a port as well, but that's
not yet the case.

However, because now PHYs can register phy_ports for every media-side
interface they have, they can register the capabilities of their ports,
which allows making the PHY-driver SFP case much more generic.
====================

Link: https://patch.msgid.link/20260108080041.553250-1-maxime.chevallier@bootlin.com
Signed-off-by: Jakub Kicinski <kuba@kernel.org>
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