gpiolib: provide provision to register pin ranges

pinctrl subsystem needs gpio chip base to prepare set of gpio
pin ranges, which a given pinctrl driver can handle. This is
important to handle pinctrl gpio request calls in order to
program a given pin properly for gpio operation.

As gpio base is allocated dynamically during gpiochip
registration, presently there exists no clean way to pass this
information to the pinctrl subsystem.

After few discussions from [1], it was concluded that may be
gpio controller reporting the pin range it supports, is a
better way than pinctrl subsystem directly registering it.

[1] http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linux.ports.arm.kernel/184816

Cc: Grant Likely <grant.likely@secretlab.ca>
Signed-off-by: Viresh Kumar <viresh.kumar@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Shiraz Hashim <shiraz.hashim@st.com>
[Edited documentation a bit]
Signed-off-by: Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@linaro.org>

1 files changed, 42 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/gpio.txt b/Documentation/gpio.txt
index e08a883de36..77a1d11af72 100644
--- a/Documentation/gpio.txt
+++ b/Documentation/gpio.txt
@@ -439,6 +439,48 @@ slower clock delays the rising edge of SCK, and the I2C master adjusts its
 signaling rate accordingly.
 
 
+GPIO controllers and the pinctrl subsystem
+------------------------------------------
+
+A GPIO controller on a SOC might be tightly coupled with the pinctrl
+subsystem, in the sense that the pins can be used by other functions
+together with an optional gpio feature. We have already covered the
+case where e.g. a GPIO controller need to reserve a pin or set the
+direction of a pin by calling any of:
+
+pinctrl_request_gpio()
+pinctrl_free_gpio()
+pinctrl_gpio_direction_input()
+pinctrl_gpio_direction_output()
+
+But how does the pin control subsystem cross-correlate the GPIO
+numbers (which are a global business) to a certain pin on a certain
+pin controller?
+
+This is done by registering "ranges" of pins, which are essentially
+cross-reference tables. These are described in
+Documentation/pinctrl.txt
+
+While the pin allocation is totally managed by the pinctrl subsystem,
+gpio (under gpiolib) is still maintained by gpio drivers. It may happen
+that different pin ranges in a SoC is managed by different gpio drivers.
+
+This makes it logical to let gpio drivers announce their pin ranges to
+the pin ctrl subsystem before it will call 'pinctrl_request_gpio' in order
+to request the corresponding pin to be prepared by the pinctrl subsystem
+before any gpio usage.
+
+For this, the gpio controller can register its pin range with pinctrl
+subsystem. There are two ways of doing it currently: with or without DT.
+
+For with DT support refer to Documentation/devicetree/bindings/gpio/gpio.txt.
+
+For non-DT support, user can call gpiochip_add_pin_range() with appropriate
+parameters to register a range of gpio pins with a pinctrl driver. For this
+exact name string of pinctrl device has to be passed as one of the
+argument to this routine.
+
+
 What do these conventions omit?
 ===============================
 One of the biggest things these conventions omit is pin multiplexing, since