Currently the PHY management type is selected by the MAC driver arbitrary.
The decision is based on the presence of the "fixed-link" node and on a
will of the driver's authors.
This caused a regression recently, when mvneta driver suddenly started
to use the in-band status for auto-negotiation on fixed links.
It appears the auto-negotiation may not work when expected by the MAC driver.
Sebastien Rannou explains:
<< Yes, I confirm that my HW does not generate an in-band status. AFAIK, it's
a PHY that aggregates 4xSGMIIs to 1xQSGMII ; the MAC side of the PHY (with
inband status) is connected to the switch through QSGMII, and in this context
we are on the media side of the PHY. >>
https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/7/10/206

This patch introduces the new string property 'managed' that allows
the user to set the management type explicitly.
The supported values are:
"auto" - default. Uses either MDIO or nothing, depending on the presence
of the fixed-link node
"in-band-status" - use in-band status
Signed-off-by: Stas Sergeev <stsp@users.sourceforge.net>

CC: Rob Herring <robh+dt@kernel.org>
CC: Pawel Moll <pawel.moll@arm.com>
CC: Mark Rutland <mark.rutland@arm.com>
CC: Ian Campbell <ijc+devicetree@hellion.org.uk>
CC: Kumar Gala <galak@codeaurora.org>
CC: Florian Fainelli <f.fainelli@gmail.com>
CC: Grant Likely <grant.likely@linaro.org>
CC: devicetree@vger.kernel.org
CC: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
CC: netdev@vger.kernel.org
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>