Re: [PATCH] pinctrl: imx5: start numbering pad from 0

[Dong Aisheng <b29396-KZfg59tc24xl57MIdRCFDg@public.gmane.org>]

On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 09:59:50PM +0800, Shawn Guo wrote:
...
> > Another known issue is that via this way, that means the pinctrl subsystem
> > can only see the using pads, this is a bit not align with the pinctrl
> > subsystem design. No sure if Linus would like to see it.
> > 
> I do not quite follow on this.  The "enum imx51_pads" will still be
> there, so all the pads will still be visible to the pinctrl system.
> 
Sorry, i did not describe it accurately.
The problem is that those pins are visible to pinctrl subystem, but the pinctrl
subsystem can not manage them all.
Not sure this meet Linus's original design purpose.
Because for the way proposed, all the pin's basic properties like mux_reg, config_reg
are parsed from device tree at runtime.
If a pin is not used in device tree, the driver can not know this pin's
corresponding registers.
Thus, for those unused pins, we can not manage it on mux or config in pinctrl
subsystem and driver.

For example, the pin_config_get/pin_config_set API in
include/linux/pinctrl/consumer.h can not work for such pins.
Then imx_pinconf_dbg_show in current driver may need change since it does not
support show all pins's config value.
It looks like not a big issue currently since i did not see any client driver
using this API.
But i'm not sure if we may have this requirement in the future.
For example, is it possible that pinctrl subsystem may support configure pins
via sysfs dynamically?

Linus, Stephen,
Any comment on it?

If it supports, will imx driver also support config unused pins in devicetree
via sysfs?
Probably it may be rarely used and imx just does not support it.
Then we can get register data from devicetree.

Regards
Dong Aisheng