I've a Intel 10Gbe driver, ixgbe, on a piece of new hardware. It's not connected to any "conventional" PHY via MII. Instead, it's connected to a media converter that converts 10G-KR to XAUI. The 10G-KR is from Intel Xeon processor where the MAC is implemented, while the XAUI is connected to a switch.

The ixgbe seems to have integrated an MDIO driver and will detect this converter, which is not on the supported PHY list.

I was thinking about disabling ixgbe's access to the PHY via MDIO, and instead providing a separate driver to configure this PHY that has vendor specific registers. However, I suspect this won't work, as most likely the network driver ixgbe won't get to link up.

Is there a standard way to do what I need to do here? Do let me know if my description here is unclear.

Looks like you can define a new instance of struct ixgbe_phy_info and write your own set of ops for accessing it. Then all you need is to add a new patch to the kernel to add support for your phy. Where the phy is assigned (line 295) you need to test for your card and assign your specialized phy.

https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/lat...e_type.h#L3586
https://elixir.bootlin.com/linux/lat...e_82599.c#L295