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This is why I used a VSC PHY. After they bought Microsemi (and Vitesse as a division of Microsemi) it looked like the only viable option to get a QSGMII PHY since all the other players were much worse.

When I first started the project in 2012-13, Vitesse was just as NDA-happy and I ruled them out. The original roadmap called for a 24-port switch with 24 individual TI DP83867 SGMII PHYs on three 8-port line cards.

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BTW looking at the 8051 patch bytes, they look like 8051 code to me. 0x02 is the ljmp opcode, so this is a jump table: 0x02, 0x40, 0x58, 0x02, 0x40, 0x4e, 0x02, 0x44, 0x00, 0x02, 0x42, 0x2b, 0x02, 0x41, 0x82

I poked at a vsc73xx-based switch in the past and wrote my own test firmware, but had problems with packet loss since I didn't do all the necessary phy initializations I guess, in case this might be of interest: https://github.com/ranma/openvsc73xx/blob/master/example/pay...

Also on the device I had the EEPROM was tiny and the code is loaded from EEPROM into RAM, you were pretty much stuck with 8051 assembly that had to fit into the 8KiB of onchip RAM :)

Those addresses all make sense, as 0x4000 - 4fff appears to be where the 8051 has its RAM mapped (all of the peek/poke addresses used for accessing serdes fields are on the high end)

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