Hi,
I haven't been following the list closely for a while but I have run into some issues when writing some drivers for some non-standard PHY devices.
One PHY I am supporting is the Cortina CS4321 device. This PHY can be configured in various modes such as XAUI, RXAUI, SGMII, and several FC implementations. My problem is that this PHY does not follow any of the standards as far as register usage and it requires a significant amount of configuration to make it work, including downloading firmware into the device.
One problem I have is that phy_connect ends up calling the probe function before phy_device has had the dev field connected. This is a problem because the easiest way for me to tell is by looking at information associated with the Ethernet device which we pull from the device tree. I reordered the code in phy_connect so it hooks up the Ethernet device to phy_device before calling reset, though ideally that information should be present when probe is called.
In my driver, I created a call-back function in order to determine what mode the PHY should operate in, but in order for the callback function to know it needs to know what Ethernet device it is connected to.
Both probe and reset are called before this information is available.
Another issue I have is that since the Cortina CS4321 uses non-standard registers, get_phy_id() does not work. In our tree I just declared the function as weak but I don't think this is a good long-term solution.
Ideally device tree support should be integrated more deeply into U-Boot so each PHY device would have its node offset stored like in the Linux driver.
-Aaron