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To: Marius Strobl <marius@alchemy.franken.de>
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Cc: Stefan Bethke <stb@lassitu.de>, FreeBSD-arch <freebsd-arch@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: Extending sys/dev/mii
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On Jan 25, 2012, at 3:17 PM, Marius Strobl wrote:
> Yes, architecture of newbus is built around the assumption that
> there's a single device tree and all you ever need are child-
> parent-relationships. AFAICT this assumption dates back to at
> least the device configuration in 4.4BSD and apart from the
> embedded world it held true just fine so far ...

Even in the embedded world it is true.  The problem is that in the =
embedded world multiple devices use the service of another device which =
is why we're seeing teething pain with the MDIO bus (which shares all =
the management lines between the PHY rather than having each MAC have =
its own connection to the PHY).  So while the basic resources are still =
hierarchical, the interconnects have become more complicated.  The issue =
we're facing here is that we'd assumed that the MAC PHY connection could =
provide management services since you knew you had to have data services =
or else you'd have no packet flow...

We're seeing the same struggles with gpio and interrupt pins...

Warner