Re: [PATCH RFC 4/6] net: rfkill: gpio: add device tree support

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Tuesday 21 January 2014, Linus Walleij wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 4:11 AM, Alexandre Courbot <gnurou@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > On Sat, Jan 18, 2014 at 8:11 AM, Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > I agree that's how it should be be done with the current API if your
> > driver can obtain GPIOs from both ACPI and DT. This is a potential
> > issue, as drivers are not supposed to make assumptions about who is
> > going to be their GPIO provider. Let's say you started a driver with
> > only DT in mind, and used gpio_get(dev, con_id) to get your GPIOs. DT
> > bindings are thus of the form "con_id-gpio = <phandle>", and set in
> > stone. Then later, someone wants to use your driver with ACPI. How do
> > you handle that gracefully?
> 
> Short answer is you can't. You have to pour backward-compatibility
> code into the driver first checking for that property and then falling
> back to the new binding if it doesn't exist.

With the ACPI named properties extension, it should be possible to have
something akin to a "gpio-names" list that can be attached to an indexed
array of gpio descriptors. I assume that Intel is going to need this
for named irqs, clocks, regulators, dmas as well, so I think it will
eventually get there. It's not something that can be done today though,
or that is standardized in APCI-5.0.

My guess is that named GPIOs are going to make more sense on x86 embedded
than on arm64 server.

> > I'm starting to wonder, now that ACPI is a first-class GPIO provider,
> > whether we should not start to encourage the deprecation of the
> > "con_id-gpio = <phandle>" binding form in DT and only use a single
> > indexed GPIO property per device.
> 
> You have a valid point.

Independent of ACPI, I prefer indexed "gpios" properties over "con_id-gpio"
properties anyway, because it's more consistent with some of the other
subsystems. I don't have an opinion though on whether we should also
allow a "gpios"/"gpio-names" pair, or whether we should keep the indexed
"gpios" list for the anonymous case.

> > The con_id parameter would then only
> > be used as a label, which would also have the nice side-effect that
> > all GPIOs used for a given function will be reported under the same
> > name no matter what the GPIO provider is.
> 
> As discussed earlier in this thread I'm not sure the con_id is
> suitable for labelling GPIOs. It'd be better to have a proper name
> specified in DT/ACPI instead.

+1

> > From an aesthetic point of view, I definitely prefer using con_id to
> > identify GPIOs instead of indexes, but I don't see how we can make it
> > play nice with ACPI. Thoughts?
> 
> Let's ask the DT maintainers...
> 
> I'm a bit sceptic to the whole ACPI-DT-API-should-be-unified
> just-one-function-call business, as this was just a very simple example
> of what can happen to something as simple as
> devm_gpiod_get[_index]().

I think a unified kernel API makes more sense for some subsystems than
others, and it depends a bit on the rate of adoption of APCI for drivers
that already have a DT binding (or vice versa, if that happens).

GPIO might actually be in the first category since it's commonly used
for off-chip components that will get shared across ARM and x86 (as
well as everything else), while a common kernel API would be less
important for things that are internal to an SoC where Intel is the
only company needing ACPI support.

	Arnd
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