[U-Boot] Question: Information regarding MII and PHY

[Graeme Russ]

Hi All,

I'm looking at adding a new Gigabit Ethernet driver (Realtek
RTL8211CL) to U-Boot. The datasheet, in addition to register
descriptions, mentions MII/GMII and PHY support (but not much on the
specifics). Now in U-Boot there appears to be a common set of code
relating to PHY and MII. There appears to be a mix of Ethernet drivers
that use MII/PHY and drivers that do not, but I cannot seems to quite
get me head around it all. One weird thing is that there does not
appear to be any granular inclusion of PHY drivers -
/include/config_phylib_all_drivers.h defines them all when
CONFIG_PHYLIB is defined, but I could not find any boards that defined
just one PHY driver. I also cannot find how MII/PHY functions interact
with PCI for PCI based cards.

In short, I'm very confused - Can anyone give me any pointers to how
it all fits together

Thanks,

Graeme