[v5] powerpc: gpio driver for mpc8349/8572/8610 and compatible
Nate Case
ncase at xes-inc.com
Fri Oct 31 01:39:35 EST 2008
On Thu, 2008-10-30 at 08:45 +0100, Peter Korsgaard wrote:
> I would write a dedicated driver for something like that instead of
> using gpiolib.
>
> Gpiolib has quite some overhead compared to the actual work for
> changing a SoC gpio pin, but it also has some very nice
> advantages. For most stuff people use GPIO pins for, the overhead is
> not an issue (SPI chip selects, leds, keys, reset signals, ..). It's
> very handy that we nowadays have generic drivers that work with any
> GPIO (being SoC gpios or stuff on spi/i2c).
For what it's worth, I think it could be useful to have an optimally
fast gpiolib driver. This would let you have truly generic bit-bang
drivers. Take a look at drivers/spi for example -- there's ~7 bit-bang
drivers in there that use spi_bitbang.c for a library of functions. I
am not familiar with these drivers, but at a glance it seems feasible
that with fast gpiolib implementations you could reduce all of those to
a single spi_bitbang.c driver.
Trent, it looks like the big performance wins for you were obtained by
deviating from the gpiolib interface? In that case a generic SPI/JTAG
bit bang driver wouldn't benefit from the speed boosts in your MPC8572
GPIO driver (without explicitly calling mpc8572_gpio_lock and
_mpc8572_gpio_set, etc). Is that correct? In any case, I appreciate
what you did with your driver, so please don't give up on getting some
of your bits merged in :)
--
Nate Case <ncase at xes-inc.com>
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