1. 09 2月, 2016 1 次提交
    • L
      gpio: add a userspace chardev ABI for GPIOs · 3c702e99
      Linus Walleij 提交于
      A new chardev that is to be used for userspace GPIO access is
      added in this patch. It is intended to gradually replace the
      horribly broken sysfs ABI.
      
      Using a chardev has many upsides:
      
      - All operations are per-gpiochip, which is the actual
        device underlying the GPIOs, making us tie in to the
        kernel device model properly.
      
      - Hotpluggable GPIO controllers can come and go, as this
        kind of problem has been know to userspace for character
        devices since ages, and if a gpiochip handle is held in
        userspace we know we will break something, whereas the
        sysfs is stateless.
      
      - The one-value-per-file rule of sysfs is really hard to
        maintain when you want to twist more than one knob at a time,
        for example have in-kernel APIs to switch several GPIO
        lines at the same time, and this will be possible to do
        with a single ioctl() from userspace, saving a lot of
        context switching.
      
      We also need to add a new bus type for GPIO. This is
      necessary for example for userspace coldplug, where sysfs is
      traversed to find the boot-time device nodes and create the
      character devices in /dev.
      
      This new chardev ABI is *non* *optional* and can be counted
      on to be present in the future, emphasizing the preference
      of this ABI.
      
      The ABI only implements one single ioctl() to get the name
      and number of GPIO lines of a chip. Even this is debatable:
      see it as a minimal example for review. This ABI shall be
      ruthlessly reviewed and etched in stone.
      
      The old /sys/class/gpio is still optional to compile in,
      but will be deprecated.
      
      Unique device IDs are created using IDR, which is overkill
      and insanely scalable, but also well tested.
      
      Cc: Johan Hovold <johan@kernel.org>
      Cc: Michael Welling <mwelling@ieee.org>
      Cc: Markus Pargmann <mpa@pengutronix.de>
      Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
      Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
      Signed-off-by: NLinus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org>
      3c702e99