On 11/9/22 17:41, Vladimir Oltean wrote: > On Thu, Nov 03, 2022 at 05:06:39PM -0400, Sean Anderson wrote: >> Several (later) patches in this series cannot be applied until a stable >> release has occured containing the dts updates. > > New kernels must remain compatible with old device trees. Well, this binding is not present in older device trees, so it needs to be added before these patches can be applied. It also could be possible to manually bind the driver using e.g. a helper function (like what is done with lynx_pcs_create_on_bus). Of course this would be tricky, because we would need to unbind any generic phy driver attached, but avoid unbinding an existing Lynx PCS driver. As I understand it, kernels must be compatible with device trees from a few kernels before and after. There is not a permanent guarantee of backwards compatibility (like userspace has) because otherwise we would never be able to make internal changes (such as what is done in this series). I have suggested deferring these patches until after an LTS release as suggested by Rob last time [1]. --Sean [1] https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/20220718194444.GA3377770-robh@xxxxxxxxxx/
