Ethernet PHY drivers

[Chris Johns]

On 27/11/11 3:41 AM, John Teller wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm mucking about with Blackfin networking stuff and was able to get the
> Ethernet driver running on a BF527. At this point it only talks to the
> PHY using the basic IEEE register set, which is OK for getting the board
> up and running. Unfortunately, all the good stuff like interrupt
> generation on link changes etc. are in the extended vendor-specific area.
>

Nice.

> After looking around the 4.10 codebase, I see that every architecture
> has its own PHY drivers, which are pretty much tied into the
> architecture's built-in PHY, or a small subset of available parts.
>
> I've also worked with uClinux on the Blackfin, where the PHY drivers are
> separate from the MAC. It's a big and complicated system, very much
> overkill for what I believe RTEMS is aimed at, namely a small embedded
> system with a predefined hardware configuration. Politics and licensing
> aside, there is still plenty in there to be learned from.
>
> Are there any projects afoot to add a subset of this kind of
> functionality? If not, I'm willing to give it a go.
>

No there is no specific MII project happening.

I suppose the only comment I can make is the TCP/IP stack needs to be 
updated to the latest version and for this we want a much closer match 
to the FreeBSD code base, including drivers. I would expect we bring 
across the MII layer with a new stack.

Chris