Speaker
Description
There are devices out-there that have several front-facing ports that
are connected to the same interface, through different physical
configurations.
Support for having multiple PHYs, each driving one port, is ongoing and
was presented at netdevconf 0x17.
However, support for having several ports (or connectors) connected to
the same MAC isn't there yet, this talk aims at presenting the plans for
that and discuss the challenges encountered.
Having a proper port representation would allow end-users to enumerate,
and manually control each individual port to select/unselect it,
get its technology such as Fiber/Copper.
It will also help us developers get some clean and precise info on the
port, to know for example if this is a 2 lanes or 4 lanes BaseT port, if
it's a Fiber port without SFP, and cleanly deal with newly supported
features such as PoE, which is really specific to a Port and not a PHY
device as it's represented today.
This is especially relevant for embedded use-cases, where most of the
time all these information are exposed through device-tree.
This work will also be used as the main interface to control the
to-be-introduced multiplexers, allowing to have several front-facing ports
controlled by either the same PHY, or different PHYS, themselved multiplexed.
This talk will therefore sum-up the use-cases, current state of the
aforementioned work, and lead to discussions on the various challenges
on which the inputs from the Net community could help greatly.