| 1 Jun 2025 |
 K900 | Or at least there's not supposed to be | 12:08:01 |
 emily | so BASE-X is the one where the kernel gets to see/control more stuff? | 12:08:18 |
| K900 | The intended way of doing 2500base-x is to have a dumb optical encoder on the other end | 12:08:20 |
 magic_rb | So with the base x modes, the host directly talks to the phy | 12:08:21 |
| K900 | B U T | 12:08:23 |
| emily | and SGMII/USXGMII is the one where the module handles more things? | 12:08:25 |
| K900 | Since there's no other vendor neutral way to do 2.5G over SFP | 12:08:34 |
| magic_rb | While sgmii and usxgmii are like, proxy things kinda | 12:08:34 |
| emily | IOW BASE-X rather than (USX)GMII is what I'm hoping for? | 12:08:42 |
| K900 | This has gone exactly as it should have | 12:08:45 |
| emily | oh good, more complications. I love storytime hour with K900 | 12:08:57 |
| K900 | As in there are now devices that are pretending to be dumb optical converters | 12:09:02 |
| K900 | But are actually phys | 12:09:10 |
| emily | right okay | 12:09:16 |
| emily | hmmm | 12:09:18 |
| K900 | But they have to because there's no standard for 2.5G MII | 12:09:21 |
| emily | does this mean that there is literally nothing – even non-standard – that can do "direct access to the MAC or whatever + 2.5G connection to host"? | 12:09:43 |
| emily | or does it just mean that people do it by forcing it into MII nonstandardly? | 12:09:50 |
| K900 | Well there's plenty of non-standard | 12:10:00 |
| K900 | Like, my PON thingy can do HSGMII | 12:10:15 |
| emily | okay then I can continue searching for my holy grail | 12:10:26 |
| K900 | Which is Realtek's version of SGMII but just 2.5x as fast | 12:10:28 |
| K900 | But that's non-standard | 12:10:35 |
| emily | oh | 12:10:40 |
| K900 | And the bpi-r4 can't do it | 12:10:44 |
| K900 | You need Realtek hardware on both ends | 12:10:50 |
| emily | that's why people are talking about getting Realtek ones with the "rollball protocol" to get at the MAC | 12:10:51 |
| emily | no there's definitely support for something like that | 12:10:59 |
| emily | it's come up in the context of 2.5G on the forum | 12:11:02 |
| emily | maybe in patches or something | 12:11:05 |
