Ethernet Switch Framework

[Adrian Chadd]

I think for switches, that doesn't necessarily hold.

ie, mii_attach() for single-PHY devices may work that way, but the weird
and wonderful world of embedded switch SoC's doesn't. You're lucky in most
instances since the bootloader does give you a mostly-working switch
config. But I doubt that's a guarantee on all platforms.

So for those (ethernet) devices, splitting out the mii/mdio stuff and _not_
necessarily presenting a working PHY may be acceptable. For now it's going
to be a subset, to having it export an MDIO bus and doing late MII
attachment may not be as architecturally "no-no" as I interpret your post.


Adrian