Commit 99adc059 authored by Linus Walleij's avatar Linus Walleij

gpio: document how to make combined GPIO+irqchip drivers

Write a few words on how GPIO drivers supplying an irqchip should
be written.

Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org>
parent 38dbfb59
......@@ -62,6 +62,37 @@ Any debugfs dump method should normally ignore signals which haven't been
requested as GPIOs. They can use gpiochip_is_requested(), which returns either
NULL or the label associated with that GPIO when it was requested.
GPIO drivers providing IRQs
---------------------------
It is custom that GPIO drivers (GPIO chips) are also providing interrupts,
most often cascaded off a parent interrupt controller, and in some special
cases the GPIO logic is melded with a SoC's primary interrupt controller.
The IRQ portions of the GPIO block are implemented using an irqchip, using
the header <linux/irq.h>. So basically such a driver is utilizing two sub-
systems simultaneously: gpio and irq.
It is legal for any IRQ consumer to request an IRQ from any irqchip no matter
if that is a combined GPIO+IRQ driver. The basic premise is that gpio_chip and
irq_chip are orthogonal, and offering their services independent of each
other.
gpiod_to_irq() is just a convenience function to figure out the IRQ for a
certain GPIO line and should not be relied upon to have been called before
the IRQ is used.
So always prepare the hardware and make it ready for action in respective
callbacks from the GPIO and irqchip APIs. Do not rely on gpiod_to_irq() having
been called first.
This orthogonality leads to ambiguities that we need to solve: if there is
competition inside the subsystem which side is using the resource (a certain
GPIO line and register for example) it needs to deny certain operations and
keep track of usage inside of the gpiolib subsystem. This is why the API
below exists.
Locking IRQ usage
-----------------
Input GPIOs can be used as IRQ signals. When this happens, a driver is requested
......@@ -73,3 +104,7 @@ This will prevent the use of non-irq related GPIO APIs until the GPIO IRQ lock
is released:
void gpiod_unlock_as_irq(struct gpio_desc *desc)
When implementing an irqchip inside a GPIO driver, these two functions should
typically be called in the .startup() and .shutdown() callbacks from the
irqchip.
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