Re: Re: [PATCH] phy: nxp-c45: add driver for tja1103

From: Andrew Lunn
Date: Tue Apr 13 2021 - 09:30:46 EST


On Tue, Apr 13, 2021 at 08:56:30AM +0200, Christian Herber wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
>
> On 4/12/2021 6:52 PM, Andrew Lunn wrote:
> >
> > So what you are say is, you don't care if the IP is completely
> > different, it all goes in one driver. So lets put this driver into
> > nxp-tja11xx.c. And then we avoid all the naming issues.
> >
> > Andrew
> >
>
> As this seems to be a key question, let me try and shed some more light on
> this.
> The original series of BASE-T1 PHYs includes TJA110, TJA1101, and TJA1102.
> They are covered by the existing driver, which has the unfortunate naming
> TJA11xx. Unfortunate, because the use of wildcards is a bit to generous.

Yes, that does happen.

Naming is difficult. But i really think nxp-c45.c is much worse. It
gives no idea at all what it supports. Or in the future, what it does
not support, and you actually need nxp-c45-ng.c.

Developers are going to look at a board, see a tja1XYZ chip, see the
nxp-tja11xx.c and enable it. Does the chip have a big C45 symbol on
it? Anything to give the idea it should use the nxp-c45 driver?

Maybe we should actually swing the complete opposite direction. Name
it npx-tja1103.c. There are lots of drivers which have a specific
name, but actually support a lot more devices. The developer sees they
have an tja1XYZ, there are two drivers which look about right, and
enable them both?

Andrew