Re: An extremely simplified pinctrl bindings proposal

From: Mitch Bradley
Date: Tue Feb 07 2012 - 02:07:43 EST


On 2/6/2012 7:33 PM, Stephen Warren wrote:
On 02/06/2012 11:05 AM, Mitch Bradley wrote:
I like the general approach of simplifying the pinctrl thing, as the
previous approach did not appear to be converging.

One possible name would be "gpconfig" - for general purpose configuration.

Sounds reasonable

The register access model in the strawman proposal is probably too
simple. 32-bit memory mapped registers are certainly the most common
subcase on ARM, but there are many other cases that occur in practice:

* Registers that must be accessed with 8, 16, or 64-bit cycles.
* Registers that have side effects on read, so read-mask-write must be
avoided
* Registers accessed via an index/data cycle pair, thus having locking
requirements
* Registers that must be read after being written, or otherwise
requiring some sort of memory-ordering enforcement.
* Time delays between pairs of writes
* PCI configuration registers, which often have some combination of the
above
* Registers behind serial buses like I2C

Both Open Firmware and ACPI have addressed this general problem. In
addition to a numeric identifier for the register, you need to specify
the access semantics. It's difficult to finitely enumerate all possible
cases, but you can get to 99.9% with a modest number of access models,
and then add new models as needed.

My thinking was that each driver that permitted execution of these
register write sequences on its registers would provide an extremely
simple driver to support this. Perhaps just one "op" function that
implemented each write, and took care of details such as timing delays
for the IO, indexed addressing, using I2C instead of memory-mapped,
perhaps register access width, etc.

Some of the items in the list above could be solved by explicit flags in
the data instead (register access width comes to mind for memory-mapped
devices at least).

Do you have any direct pointers to how OF and ACPI solved this kind of
thing; it'd be good background.

In ACPI, you declare an "OperationRegion" with a given "region space" (an enumeration from SystemMemory, SystemIO, PCIConfig, SMBus, EmbeddedControl, CMOS, PCIBARTarget) - ACPI spec section 17.5.89. Inside that operation region, you declare various fields, further specifying the subordinate access type from a region-dependent list. Those access types include ByteAcc, WordAcc, DWordAcc, QWordAcc, and BufferAcc. The field declaration further specifies whether or not a mutex must be acquired, and a rule for what to do about unmodified bits within the larger object containing the field. ACPI Spec 17.5.44

In OFW, each parent bus has a set of methods for performing memory-mapped I/O operations on its addressable regions. The child devices invoke a "map-in" method in the parent to acquire an address token, then pass that token to access methods in the parent node. For the common case, there are a set of fetch and store methods for the usual sizes (8, 16, 32), and for more complex cases, the parent can define
whatever methods make sense for its needs. The methods are implemented by byte code associated with the parent driver.



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