[PATCH] drivers: create a pin control subsystem v8

[linus.walleij@linaro.org (Linus Walleij)]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 9:36 AM, Grant Likely <grant.likely@secretlab.ca> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 09:26:38AM +0200, Linus Walleij wrote:
(...)
>> I was more thinking along the lines of one device per GPIO controller,
>> then you ioctl() to ask /dev/gpio0 how many pins it has or so.
>
> And there is also the question of whether it is even a good idea to
> export pinctrl manipulation to userspace.

The application I've seen is in automatic control.

I think people do things like connect they GPIO pins to electrical
relays, plus on top of that they use all the stuff in drivers/staging/iio.

All that from userspace. Controlling entire factories and industrial
robots, weapon systems too, I'm afraid.

The control of these dangerous things runs on a realtime-patched
kernel, in a single userspace app with a few threads and they have
done some realtime-tetris scheduling the beast more or less
manually with SCHED_FIFO. Basically that app is all that runs on
the board, and its threads take precedence over everything else
on the system.

That is the typical beast that is poking around on the GPIO sysfs
interfaces...

Yours,
Linus Walleij