On Monday, August 20, 2012, Troy Kisky wrote:
It is useful to be able to try a range of possible phy addresses to connect.
This seems like it just encourages a bad habit. How do you envision this working on a system with multiple Ethernet controllers? Or with more PHYs than Ethernet controllers? While it is often the case that the PHY is the only one on a bus, I think it's a bad idea to codify that notion in the driver (I know, it was already like that).
It's best if the driver make the reasonable assumption that its PHY address is known when it comes up, and let the board code, which can be aware that the PHY may exist in varying locations, search for the PHY. With that approach, the driver won't have to change when some board designer makes the PHY topology even stranger, and I would support a PHYLIB function to do searching much as you've specified. But the board-specific code needs to be able to tell the driver definitively which PHY belongs to it.
Andy