Re: [PATCH v11 2/6] gpiolib: allow to specify the firmware node in struct gpio_chip

[Andy Shevchenko <andriy.shevchenko@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Dec 02, 2021 at 12:24:06PM +0100, Bartosz Golaszewski wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 2, 2021 at 11:58 AM Andy Shevchenko
> <andriy.shevchenko@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Dec 01, 2021 at 02:11:28PM +0100, Bartosz Golaszewski wrote:
> > > On Tue, Nov 30, 2021 at 10:04 PM Bartosz Golaszewski <brgl@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > ...
> >
> > > Let me maybe rephrase the problem: currently, for GPIO devices
> > > instantiating multiple banks created outside of the OF or ACPI
> > > frameworks (e.g. instantiated manually and configured using a
> > > hierarchy of software nodes with a single parent swnode and a number
> > > of child swnodes representing the children), it is impossible to
> > > assign firmware nodes other than the one representing the top GPIO
> > > device to the gpiochip child devices.
> > >
> > > In fact if we want to drop the OF APIs entirely from gpiolib - this
> > > would be the right first step as for gpio-sim it actually replaces the
> > > gc->of_node = some_of_node; assignment that OF-based drivers do for
> > > sub-nodes defining banks and it does work with device-tree (I verified
> > > that too) thanks to the fwnode abstraction layer.
> >
> > In exchange of acknowledgements I confirm that I understood the issue
> > you are describing. What I still don't like is this band-aid:ish approach.
> > What we really need is to replace of_node by fwnode in GPIO library once
> > for all. But it can be done later after your simulation series (or before,
> > i.o.w. independently), hence I propose to update TODO and do it separately.
> >
> 
> But this is what we already do for OF. How would the core gpiolib know
> how the firmware nodes represent the banks? It's the driver's job to
> tell the framework which node corresponds with what. If anything, we
> should start replacing of_nodes with fwnodes in drivers and eventually
> we'd drop the of_node pointer from gpio_chip entirely, but we'd keep
> the fwnode pointer I added as the driver still needs to assign it
> itself.
> 
> Again: I may be missing something here but I've been going through
> this on and on and can't figure out any other way. Looking at
> gpiolib-acpi.c I don't see it correctly assigning fwnodes to
> sub-devices either but I don't have any HW to test it.
> 
> As for this series: I can't really drop this patch as gpio-sim relies
> on swnodes being correctly associated with gpio_chips to identify the
> gpiodevs from configfs callbacks.

Then we need to replace of_node by fwnode as a first step. I have looked
briefly into the list of drivers that may have been cleaned up and it doesn't
look too long.

-- 
With Best Regards,
Andy Shevchenko