Re: [PATCH 5/5] pinctrl: Add support pin control for UP board CPLD/FPGA

[Andy Shevchenko]

On Fri, Oct 21, 2022 at 11:09:27AM +0200, Linus Walleij wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 19, 2022 at 4:26 AM chengwei <foxfly.lai.tw@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > The UP Squared board <http://www.upboard.com> implements certain
> > features (pin control) through an on-board FPGA.

> I am a bit confused by this driver. Andy pointed out some obvious nits that
> need to be fixed but the overall architecture here is also a bit puzzling.
> 
> This seems to want to be compatible to Raspberry Pi (RPi), then which one?
> 
> The driver seems to translate GPIO calls to "native GPIO" in some cases,
> which GPIO controller is that?

There is an SoC level GPIO (Apollo Lake I believe) and there is a discrete
component between it and user visible header (connector). This driver AFAIU
is about controlling that discrete component.

> Also I don't see why, normally a pin control
> driver is an agnostic back-end for a GPIO controller, so the GPIO driver
> should be the same (whatever "native") means, and this driver should
> not even implement a gpio chip, just let the GPIO driver do its job
> and call back into the pin control back-end whenever it needs it.
> 
> Also we already have a driver that collects existing GPIOs to a new
> GPIO chip, the GPIO aggregator:
> drivers/gpio/gpio-aggregator.c
> 
> Maybe if you can explain a bit about how this hardware works and why
> you have to do indirect calls to another GPIO controller, things will
> be easier to understand?

-- 
With Best Regards,
Andy Shevchenko