that's easy, PHY is a thing that gets mentioned in journalctl logs when I'm trying to figure out why my Linux laptop keeps dropping its wireless connection
I'll admit I Googled it. I was expecting it to be some terminology I wasn't familiar with but to be familiar with the concepts. But in reality it seems far more relevant to hardware design than network engineering unless there's something I'm missing.
There was a packet pushers podcast with John Harrington or @petelewin.bsky.social that dove into this. It feels weird to say the PHY is the logical representation of the operating systems mapping of where it is firing off that big endian-ness. SERDES and FPGAs matter too 🥺
im using alternative search engines like brave or duckduckgo for years now and it works totally fine. privacy respecting without milicious ads pushed before search results. no need to use google
I was going to say this was probably easier to internalize when the phy was packaged separately, but I guess our modern pluggables are a pretty close analog to the AUI and MII accessories of my youth.
Is there an important distinction between these? If so, I'm not aware of it.
Depends on the other party imo. If I'm talking to friends outside of the field I'll just say that the PHY layer is the cables that transfer all the information and just leave it at that
Which thing that gets called a PHY are we talking about?
Because *I* would call the *chip* that handles TX/RX the PHY (and that's the depth of my description); but I have also seen complete NICs and SFP transceivers called PHYs... I'm not sure which is (more) technically correct.
Comments
(not snarc, genuinely cool to see your evolving interest)
It's were you get horror shows on site like paint on the rj45 shoved back into the Voip phone by contractors.
That one was wild because poe worked but not link.
Or Physical Layer.
Its all layer one.
Physical device? Layer one. That's the only part that matters.
a PHY is a component of the ethernet system: it technically works at both layer 1 & 2. it is not the same thing as the OSI model layer 1.
source: not a network engineer
“The arc of the search engine debate is long — but it bends toward Google.”
Is there an important distinction between these? If so, I'm not aware of it.
For this question, you're allowed to refer to Stack Overflow.
I’ve never heard this term in 20 years, three of those spent at Cisco managing the largest lab in Building 1.
Because *I* would call the *chip* that handles TX/RX the PHY (and that's the depth of my description); but I have also seen complete NICs and SFP transceivers called PHYs... I'm not sure which is (more) technically correct.