[PATCH v4 5/5] net: phy: aquantia: use generic firmware loader

[Beiyan Yun]

> On 31 Oct 2025, at 11:57 PM, Marek Vasut <marek.vasut at mailbox.org> wrote:
> 
> On 10/31/25 4:21 PM, Beiyan Yun wrote:
>> Aquantia PHYs are being used w/o SPI flash in some routers recently.
>> Current firmware loader only attempts to load from FS on top of MMC,
>> limiting the use on many devices.
>> Removed the old firmware loader, migrate to generic firmware loader to
>> allow a wider range and runtime override of firmware source. (e.g., USB).
>> Tested on Buffalo WXR18000BE10P with UBIFS.
>> Signed-off-by: Beiyan Yun <root at infi.wang>
>> ---
>> Changes in v4:
>> - Split firmware upload helpers change
>> - Reorder `aquantia_read_fw`
>> - Make `aquantia_read_fw` weak to allow overide
>> - Rename exit label in `aquantia_read_fw`
>> - Kconfig polish
>> Changes in v3:
>> - Select FW_LOADER with PHY_AQUANTIA_UPLOAD_FW
>> Changes in v2:
>> - Add support for script based loader
>>  drivers/net/phy/Kconfig    |  28 +++++----
>>  drivers/net/phy/aquantia.c | 122 ++++++++++++++++++++++---------------
>>  2 files changed, 91 insertions(+), 59 deletions(-)
>> diff --git a/drivers/net/phy/Kconfig b/drivers/net/phy/Kconfig
>> index 018be98705a..4a74a0d4e8c 100644
>> --- a/drivers/net/phy/Kconfig
>> +++ b/drivers/net/phy/Kconfig
>> @@ -1,4 +1,3 @@
>> -
>>  config BITBANGMII
>>  	bool "Bit-banged ethernet MII management channel support"
>>  @@ -91,23 +90,30 @@ menuconfig PHY_AQUANTIA
>>  config PHY_AQUANTIA_UPLOAD_FW
>>  	bool "Aquantia firmware loading support"
>>  	depends on PHY_AQUANTIA
>> +	select FS_LOADER
>> +	select FW_LOADER
> Can you not use the plain FW_LOADER to load the firmware from either storage, UBI or Block ? Is FS_LOADER even needed ?

Thanks for the suggestion, and yes you can, but that API is script-only—it expects the board to stage the blob and just copies from the address exposed via *_addr/_size. The current users of this driver expect the old pattern: the bootloader mounts a filesystem (MMC before, now possibly UBI/USB/etc.), reads the firmware, and applies it. Keeping an fs-loader node in the DT is effectively the same contract as the legacy MMC setup, just generalized.

The fs_loader driver gives us several things the script path doesn’t: a standard way to describe the storage via "/chosen/firmware-loader", runtime overrides through "storage_interface/fw_dev_part/fw_ubi_*, and no requirement for a board-specific script. So FS_LOADER isn’t redundant—it’s the part that replaces the hard-coded MMC flow with a configurable backend, while the script helper stays available for boards that want extra logic.