Re: [RFC PATCH 0/3] UART slave device bus

[Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org>]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2016 at 5:45 PM, One Thousand Gnomes
<gnomes@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:

> and if I look at the usermode crapfest on a lot of Android systems it
> looks similar but with the notion of things like being able to describe
>
> -       Use GPIO mode sleeping and assume first char is X to save power

It's really nasty hardware design, or a software hack to solve
a hardware problem: what should have been done is
of course create a UART with an asynchronous low-power mode
that can recieve a character and wake up the system at any time,
handing over the wakeup character(s) to the driver. That is
obviously the usecase they were designing for.

But yeah, I guess we have to contain hacks like that.

> -       Power up, wait n ms, write, read, wait n ms, power down (which
>         has to be driven at the ldisc/user level as only the ldisc
>         understands transactions, or via ioctls (right now Android user
>         space tends to do hardcoded writes to /sys.. gpio to drive power

This kind of abominational abuse of the GPIO sysfs ABI is
partly why I've obsoleted it. The right abstraction is the
fixed regulator with a GPIO line obviously, then some
sequencing along the lines of what you can find in
drivers/mmc/core/pwrseq*

Unfortunately that sysfs ABI crept in during a window of time
when GPIO was unmaintained and I am trying my best to
contain and improve the situation.

Yours,
Linus Walleij