Re: [PATCH] [RFC] pinctrl: add a driver for Energy Micro's efm32 SoCs

From: Shawn Guo
Date: Thu Dec 08 2011 - 23:19:43 EST


On Thu, Dec 08, 2011 at 08:44:03PM -0700, Stephen Warren wrote:
> On 12/08/2011 06:01 PM, Shawn Guo wrote:
> > On Thu, Dec 08, 2011 at 03:14:40PM -0800, Stephen Warren wrote:
> >> Presumably, the set of pins, groups, and functions is determined by the
> >> SoC HW. Platform data is usually board-specific rather than SoC specific.
> >> You have two choices here: You could either parse this data from device
> >> tree as Arnd suggested (and I think as the TI OMAP pinctrl driver will),
> >> or do what I've done in the Tegra pinctrl driver, and simply put each
> >> SoC's data into the driver and select which one to use based on the DT
> >> compatible flag; I didn't see the point of putting data in to the DT that
> >> was identical for every board using a given SoC.
> >>
> > I'm not sure about tegra, but for imx, it's very difficult to enumerate
> > all these data and list them in pinctrl driver. Sascha gave a few
> > examples when we discussed about it in another thread. The TX and RX
> > pin of UART has 4 options each. SD could possibly have 1, 4, and 8
> > data lines. Display interface could have 16, 24, 32 data lines, etc.
> > All these options are chosen by board design for given soc pinmux
> > design. So putting this data into device tree makes sense for imx too.
>
> The pinctrl driver should simply represent the raw options that the HW
> supports on each individual pin. This table should be readily enumerable

It is enumerable. But I guess I said it's difficult (and not worth).

> (it's probably already in the SoC's datasheet), and of non-exponential
> size. In this table, considerations such as display bus width do not
> come into play; you just note that a certain 32 pins could support the
> display function.
>
> The board-specific selection of which function to use for each pin/group
> (which is where the actual selection of e.g. 16/24/32-bit display bus
> comes in) is provided by the board-specific mapping table, which I agree
> makes perfect sense to put into device tree, since it's potentially
> highly variable.
>
The situation is there might be a few possible pin groups for each
function of 16/24/32-bit display. Let's think about the UART case
I put above, to enumerate all the groups, we will have 16 groups for
one UART instance. And we have 5 UART ports on recent imx SoC.

--
Regards,
Shawn

--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/