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  • Vladimir Oltean's avatar
    net: freescale: replace usage of phy-mode = "sgmii-2500" with "2500base-x" · 7c2d5d16
    Vladimir Oltean authored and Ramon Fried's avatar Ramon Fried committed
    After the discussion here:
    https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/20210603143453.if7hgifupx5k433b@pali/
    
    which resulted in this patch:
    https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/netdevbpf/patch/20210704134325.24842-1-pali@kernel.org/
    
    and many other discussions before it, notably:
    https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-arm-kernel/patch/1512016235-15909-1-git-send-email-Bhaskar.Upadhaya@nxp.com/
    
    
    
    it became apparent that nobody really knows what "SGMII 2500" is.
    Certainly, Freescale/NXP hardware engineers name this protocol
    "SGMII 2500" in the reference manuals, but the PCS devices do not
    support any "SGMII" specific features when operating at the speed of
    2500 Mbps, no in-band autoneg and no speed change via symbol replication
    . So that leaves a fixed speed of 2500 Mbps using a coding of 8b/10b
    with a SERDES lane frequency of 3.125 GHz. In fact, "SGMII 2500 without
    in-band autoneg and at a fixed speed" is indistinguishable from
    "2500base-x without in-band autoneg", which is precisely what these NXP
    devices support.
    
    So it just appears that "SGMII 2500" is an unclear name with no clear
    definition that stuck.
    
    As such, in the Linux kernel, the drivers which use this SERDES protocol
    use the 2500base-x phy-mode.
    
    This patch converts U-Boot to use 2500base-x too, or at least, as much
    as it can.
    
    Note that I would have really liked to delete PHY_INTERFACE_MODE_SGMII_2500
    completely, but the mvpp2 driver seems to even distinguish between SGMII
    2500 and 2500base-X. Namely, it enables in-band autoneg for one but not
    the other, and forces flow control for one but not the other. This goes
    back to the idea that maybe 2500base-X is a fiber protocol and SGMII-2500
    is an MII protocol (connects a MAC to a PHY such as Aquantia), but the
    two are practically indistinguishable through everything except use case.
    
    NXP devices can support both use cases through an identical configuration,
    for example RX flow control can be unconditionally enabled in order to
    support rate adaptation performed by an Aquantia PHY. At least I can
    find no indication in online documents published by Cisco which would
    point towards "SGMII-2500" being an actual standard with an actual
    definition, so I cannot say "yes, NXP devices support it".
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarVladimir Oltean <vladimir.oltean@nxp.com>
    Reviewed-by: default avatarRamon Fried <rfried.dev@gmail.com>
    7c2d5d16