[U-Boot-Users] MPC8439E + Marvell 888E1111 (blah!)

[Andy Fleming]

On 6/22/07, David Hawkins <dwh at ovro.caltech.edu> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm designing an MPC8349E-based board. I'll be
> working on the PCB layout starting next week.
>
> To minimize my porting effort for both U-Boot and
> Linux, I decided to copy the MPC8349E-MDS-PB reference
> design and use the Marvell 888E1111 gigabit transceiver
> for the network interface.

You might want to look at the ITX design.  It's simpler.  The MDS/PB
design is fairly modular, and might be more complicated than what you
want.  But obviously, you would be the best judge of what you want
your board to do.


>
> I find that the Marvell chipset documents are proprietary
> and require the signing of an NDA to access.

Yeah, that seems to be a trend for PHY manufacturers.  Don't read this
as an endorsement (I've not used it before), but
http://www.national.com/pf/DP/DP83865.html is supported in u-boot, and
looks like you can get the documentation with no restrictions (I
downloaded the docs just a second ago).

Also, you don't need to worry too much about which PHY you use from a
software standpoint.  Many PHYs follow the 802.11 spec, and both
u-boot and Linux have generic drivers which are used by default for
unknown PHYs.  I frequently forget to enable my PHY driver in my
kernel builds, and almost never have a problem.

So you might just need to find a PHY, and make sure it doesn't require
any special initialization or configuration.  Most PHYs should fall
into that category.

And even if it does, the tsec/gianfar drivers for the ethernet on the
83xx have good (I think) infrastructure for using different PHYs, and
the average PHY driver requires very little in the way of code.

Andy