MotorComm YT8521 Gigabit Ethernet Support Coming For Linux 6.2

Landing in "net-next" on Monday is wired networking support for the MotorComm YT8521 Ethernet Gigabit PHY. This network ASIC may not ring a bell for most folks, but is used so far by one notable RISC-V development board.

The MotorComm YT8521 Gigabit Ethernet PHY driver for the Linux kernel was contributed by MotorComm itself, the Chinese company primarily focused on network communication chipsets for the automotive industry. MotorComm itself is also only a five year old company and given its market focus is likely out of scope to most Phoronix readers.

But what makes this MotorComm YT8521 Ethernet chipset driver addition notable is that this PHY is used by the StarFive VisionFive. The StarFive VisionFive is a lower-cost RISC-V board that has been seeing more work on upstream Linux support and interest in various development communities. For example, Ubuntu/Canonical has been working on VisionFive support and is running with patches on their latest Ubuntu Linux releases.

StarFive VisionFive

The StarFive VisionFive is powered by a SiFive U74 dual-core RV64GC SOC, 4GB or 8GB of LPDDR4 system memory, NVDLA engines, a neural network engine, and more. This board makes use of the MotorComm YT8521 and now with Linux 6.2 there is mainline support for wired networking.

There are good chances as well we could see the YT8521 used by other Chinese single board computers moving forward. With the driver merged into net-next, it was specifically mentioned having undergone testing using the StarFive VisionFive development board. This is building upon the "motorcomm" driver codebase that so far has just been used for supporting their earlier YT8511 Gigabit PHY. Look for this YT8521 support coming in Linux 6.2.