Re: [PATCH] gpio: Allow user to customise maximum number of GPIOs

[Linus Walleij]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2022 at 11:48 AM Arnd Bergmann <arnd@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

> As I understood, the problem that Christophe ran into is that the
> dynamic registration of additional gpio chips is broken because
> it unregisters the chip if the number space is exhausted:
>
>                 base = gpiochip_find_base(gc->ngpio);
>                 if (base < 0) {
>                         ret = base;
>                         spin_unlock_irqrestore(&gpio_lock, flags);
>                         goto err_free_label;
>                 }
>
> From the git history, it looks like this error was never handled gracefully
> even if the intention was to keep going without a number assignment,
> so there are probably other bugs one runs into after changing this.

Hm that should be possible to get rid of altogether? I suppose it is only
there to satisfy

static inline bool gpio_is_valid(int number)
{
        return number >= 0 && number < ARCH_NR_GPIOS;
}

?

If using GPIO descriptors, any descriptor != NULL is valid,
this one is just used with legacy GPIOs. Maybe we should just
delete gpio_is_valid() everywhere and then drop the cap?

I think there may be systems and users that still depend on GPIO base
numbers being assigned from ARCH_NR_GPIOS and
downwards (userspace GPIO numbers in sysfs will also change...)
otherwise we could assign from 0 and up.

Right now the safest would be:
Assign from 512 and downwards until we hit 0 then assign
from something high, like U32_MAX and downward.

That requires dropping gpio_is_valid() everywhere.

If we wanna be bold, just delete gpio_is_valid() and assign
bases from 0 and see what happens. But I think that will
lead to regressions.

Yours,
Linus Walleij