Re: [PATCH v3] gpio: interrupt consistency check for OF GPIO IRQs

Lars Poeschel
2013-09-02T09:38:25Z

Am Freitag, 30. August 2013, 13:53:45 schrieb Stephen Warren:
> On 08/29/2013 01:26 PM, Linus Walleij wrote:
> > On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 10:17 PM, Stephen Warren <swarren@wwwdotorg.org>
wrote:
> >> On 08/26/2013 08:07 AM, Lars Poeschel wrote:
> >>> Currently the kernel is ambigously treating GPIOs and interrupts
> >>> from a GPIO controller: GPIOs and interrupts are treated as
> >>> orthogonal. This unfortunately makes it unclear how to actually
> >>> retrieve and request a GPIO line or interrupt from a GPIO
> >>> controller in the device tree probe path.
> >>
> >> I still think that this patch is the wrong approach. Instead, the logic
> >> should be hooked into gpio_request() and request_irq(). This patch only
> >> addresses DT, and ignores anything else, hence doesn't seem like the
> >> right level of abstraction to plug in, since the issue is not related to
> >> DT.>
> > We tried to do it that way, and it exploded. See commit
> > b4419e1a15905191661ffe75ba2f9e649f5d565e
> > "gpio/omap: auto request GPIO as input if used as IRQ via DT"
> >
> > Here request_irq() augmented through its irqdomain to
> > issue gpio_request_one().
> >
> > Why was this patch reverted? It seems this is what has not
> > managed to reach the audience here.
> >
> > It turns out some drivers were already doing this:
> >
> > request_gpio(gpio);
> > gpio_direction_input(gpio);
> > request_irq(gpio_to_irq(gpio));
> >
> > Looks perfectly valid right?
> >
> > Not so: after the above change, we tried to request the
> > GPIO a *second time* in the GPIO driver's irq map function,
> > and of course it failed, as it was already taken.
> >
> > So saying that it should be done in the request_irq()
> > function is imposing this other semantic on the kernel
> > instead: you must *NOT* request the GPIO with
> > request_gpio() if you're going to use it as an IRQ.
>
> Surely both request_gpio() and request_irq() must both request the GPIO
> (amongst other things), with the caveat that if the same driver does
> both, this specific "sharing" is allowed.

As explained in my previous mail, I do not see, how this should work.

> If that won't work, then the very core concept behind what this patch is
> attempting to do won't work.

The concept only does not work in the non-DT case, which we do neither try to
address with this patch.

> > (Also, it force us to implement the same code in each
> > and every driver, but that is a lesser problem.)
>
> Drivers don't have to do the request; the IRQ/GPIO core can do this,
> with drivers simply providing an irq_to_gpio() (which only returns valid
> data iff there's a 1:1 mapping between IRQs and GPIOs in that particular
> HW).
>
> > I don't quite understand what is so hard around this.
> > We cannot get away from restricting the semantics in
> > some way, if gpio-controllers shall also be interrupt-controllers,
> > the current patch is the least intrusive I've seen so far.
>
> Yet the current patch only addresses a limited set of cases, since it
> doesn't hook the APIs but rather parses the DT. It doesn't cover the
> non-DT case. It should if the feature is useful.

As pointed out before, only DT has this problem, that, whatever you do,
otherwise it has no chance to request a gpio for a gpio-backed irq. Drivers
can do this and board files also can do this.
I agree with you that it is somewhat odd, that there are two different ways,
doing the same thing, but I don't see another way yet.