On 11/21/2016 02:17 PM, Peter Rosin wrote: [...] > I have a piece of hardware that is using the same 3 GPIO pins > to control four 8-way muxes. Three of them control ADC lines > to an ADS1015 chip with an iio driver, and the last one > controls the SDA line of an i2c bus. We have some deployed > code to handle this, but you do not want to see it or ever > hear about it. I'm not sure why I even mention it. Anyway, > the situation has nagged me to no end for quite some time. > > So, after first getting more intimate with the i2c muxing code > and later discovering the drivers/iio/inkern.c file and > writing a couple of drivers making use of it, I came up with > what I think is an acceptable solution; add a generic mux > controller driver (and subsystem) that is shared between all > instances, and combine that with an iio mux driver and a new > generic i2c mux driver. The new i2c mux I called "simple" > since it is only hooking the i2c muxing and the new mux > controller (much like the alsa simple card driver does for ASoC). While abstracting this properly is all nice and good and the way it should be done, but it also adds a lot of complexity and the devicetree adds a lot of restrictions on what can actually be represented. There is a certain point where the fabric on a PCB becomes so complex that it deserves to be a device on its own (like the audio fabric drivers). Especially when the hardware is built with a certain application in mind and the driver is supposed to impose policy which reflects this application. The latter can often not properly be described with the primitives the devicetree can offer. And I think your setup is very borderline what can be done in a declarative way only and it adds a lot of complexity over a more imperative solution in form of a driver. I think it is worth investigating about having a driver that is specific to your fabric and handles the interdependencies of the discrete components. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-doc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
