> You missed my argument about the device tree describing the HW (thus the > wires, electrical aspects too) and not configuring a certain protocol (the > device tree does not configure HW, it describes HW). Hi Madalin You have lots of different points here. I'm just picking out one. I would say this is a grey area. You need to ensure both devices on the XFI bus are using the same protocol. There are a few ways you could do this: The MAC and the PHY tells phylink what each is capable of, and phylink picks a common protocol. Leave it to the boot loader/firmware and cross your fingers. Make a design decision, this board will use protocol X, and put that in device tree. It is describing how we expect the hardware to be used. The Marvell SERDES interfaces are pretty generic. They can be used for SATA, USB3, or networking. But these are all protocols running on top of SERDES. So would you argue we cannot describe in device tree that one SERDES is to be used for USB and another for SATA? Andrew