Messages in this thread | | | Date | Mon, 28 Jun 2021 12:57:42 +0300 | From | Cristian Ciocaltea <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH v3 2/3] net: ethernet: actions: Add Actions Semi Owl Ethernet MAC driver |
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Hi Amit,
On Mon, Jun 28, 2021 at 01:55:40PM +0530, Amit Tomer wrote: > Hi, > > > > Do you know the story behind this Ethernet controller? > > > > I just happened to get a board based on the S500 SoC, so I took this > > opportunity to help improving the mainline kernel support, but other > > than that I do not really know much about the hardware history. > > > > > The various > > > receive/transmit descriptor definitions are 99% those defined in > > > drivers/net/ethernet/stmmicro/stmmac/descs.h for the normal descriptor. > > > > That's an interesting observation. I could only assume the vendor did > > not want to reinvent the wheel here, but I cannot say if this is a > > common design scheme or is something specific to STMicroelectronics > > only. > > I am not entirely sure about it but it looks like it *may* only need > to have a glue driver to > connect to DWMAC.
From the RX/TX descriptors perspective, this looks like a Synopsys IP, but the MAC register layout is not similar at all.
Thanks to Mani, a request for clarification has been also sent to Actions, but they could not confirm. Hence, at the moment, we do not have clear evidences that it is based on Designware.
> For instance, on the U-boot[1] side (S700 is one of 64bit OWL SoC from > actions), we kind of re-uses already > existing DWMAC and provide a glue code, and on the Linux side as well > have some similar implementation (locally).
The S700 SoC provides Gigabit ethernet capabilities and I assume the controller is quite different from the 10/100 variant present on S500. As a matter of fact, Actions has confirmed that in the case of S700, the licensing was obtained from a third party IP company, although they were not certain if the provider had previous agreements with Synopsys.
Regards, Cristi
> Thanks > -Amit. > > [1]: https://source.denx.de/u-boot/u-boot/-/blob/master/drivers/net/dwmac_s700.c
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