One of the new network drivers destined for the upcoming Linux 7.2 merge window is for supporting the Airoha AN8801R Gigabit Ethernet PHY.

The Airoha AN8801R Gigabit Ethernet PHY is found on some boards such as the Mediatek Genio 720-EVK development kit. Louis-Alexis Eyraud and AngeloGioacchino Del Regno, both of Collabora, took to developing the "air_an8801" PHY driver for supporting this chip. This driver is based on a downstream kernel driver written by Airoha Technology that appears in Mediatek's vendor kernel derived from Linux 6.6.

Airoha promotes the AN8801R as a low-power, highly-integrated single-port Ethernet PHY transciever. This AN8801R PHY is geared for Ethernet switches, routers/gateways, set top boxes, smart TVs, game consoles, and more.

This new Gigabit Ethernet PHY driver was recently queued in net-next.git. With the driver being in the net-next code, it will be submitted for the upcoming Linux 7.2 merge window. Enabling the new driver is gated by the new AIR_AN8801_PHY Kconfig option.