On Fri, 14 Dec 2012 11:20:53 +0530, Naveen Krishna Chatradhi <ch.naveen@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > The arbitrator is a general purpose function which uses two GPIOs to > communicate with another device to claim/release a bus. > > i2c_transfer() > if adapter->gpio_arbit > i2c_bus_claim(); > __i2c_transfer(); > i2c_bus_release(); > > Signed-off-by: Simon Glass <sjg@xxxxxxxxxxxx> > Cc: Grant Grundler <grundler@xxxxxxxxxxxx> > Signed-off-by: Naveen Krishna Chatradhi <ch.naveen@xxxxxxxxxxx> Hi Naveen, I'm not convinced on the design of this protocol. It won't scale beyond 2 bus masters and it seems very specific to the design of a specific piece of hardware. I don't think it is mature enough to bake into the core i2c infrastructure or bindings. Nor do I think it will handle other busses properly. I can see two alternatives here. 1) build in hooks for doing i2c bus claim/release, but don't put this specific implementation into the core infrastructure 2) Create an i2c bridge driver. This would kind of be like an i2c multiplexer, but it would only have one bus and it would include the knowledge of how to use the GPIO lines for bus arbitration. I think option 2 would be the cleanest option. It would be straight forward to design a binding for it by placing a node between the i2c bus and all the i2c clients. For example: i2c@60000000 { compatible = "acme,some-i2c-device"; #address-cells = <1>; #size-cells = <0>; i2c-bridge { #address-cells = <1>; #size-cells = <0>; compatible = "samaung,i2c-gpio-arbitrate"; bus-arbitration-gpios = <&gpf0 3 1 0 0>, /* AP_CLAIM */ <&gpe0 4 0 3 0>; /* EC_CLAIM */ bus-arbitration-slew-delay-us = <10>; bus-arbitration-wait-retry-us = <2000>; bus-arbitration-wait-free-us = <50000>; i2c@52 { // Normal i2c device }; }; }; I don't know what the state of the i2c subsystem is with regard to supporting i2c multiplexer devices, so there might be some changes needed there, but I can't see it being particularly complex. It should just be a device in the middle. Any i2c device that is a child of the bridge would send transfers to the bridge, and the bridge would be responsible to claim the bus and then pass the transfer through unchanged. That eliminates the problem of trying to design an arbitration scheme that works for all. g. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-samsung-soc" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html