Some ethernet drivers (like TI CPSW) may connect and manage >1 Net PHYs per one netdevice, as result such drivers will produce warning during system boot and fail to connect second phy to netdevice when PHYLIB framework will try to create sysfs link netdev->phydev for second PHY in phy_attach_direct(), because sysfs link with the same name has been created already for the first PHY. As result, second CPSW external port will became unusable. This regression was introduced by commits: 5568363f0cb3 ("net: phy: Create sysfs reciprocal links for attached_dev/phydev" a3995460491d ("net: phy: Relax error checking on sysfs_create_link()" Patch 1: exports sysfs_create_link_nowarn() function as preparation for Patch 2. Patch 2: relaxes error checking when PHYLIB framework is creating sysfs link netdev->phydev in phy_attach_direct(), suppresses warning by using sysfs_create_link_nowarn() and adds error message instead, so links creation failure is not fatal any more and system can continue working, which fixes TI CPSW issue and makes boot logs accessible in case of NFS boot, for example. This can be stable material 4.13+. Changes in v2: - commit messages updated. v1: https://patchwork.ozlabs.org/cover/886058/ Cc: Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@xxxxxxxxx> Cc: Andrew Lunn <andrew@xxxxxxx> Grygorii Strashko (2): sysfs: symlink: export sysfs_create_link_nowarn() net: phy: relax error checking when creating sysfs link netdev->phydev drivers/net/phy/phy_device.c | 15 +++++++++++---- fs/sysfs/symlink.c | 1 + 2 files changed, 12 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-) -- 2.10.5 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-omap" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html