On Jan 25, 2012, at 3:17 PM, Marius Strobl wrote:

Even in the embedded world it is true. The problem is that in the embedded
world multiple devices use the service of another device which is why we're
seeing teething pain with the MDIO bus (which shares all the management lines
between the PHY rather than having each MAC have its own connection to the PHY).
So while the basic resources are still hierarchical, the interconnects have
become more complicated. The issue we're facing here is that we'd assumed that
the MAC PHY connection could provide management services since you knew you had
to have data services or else you'd have no packet flow...

We're seeing the same struggles with gpio and interrupt pins...