[PATCH] RFC: interrupt consistency check for OF GPIO IRQs

[Laurent Pinchart]

Hi Linus,

On Wednesday 31 July 2013 01:44:53 Linus Walleij wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 6:30 AM, Grant Likely wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 6:36 AM, Linus Walleij wrote:
> >> To solve this dilemma, perform an interrupt consistency check
> >> when adding a GPIO chip: if the chip is both gpio-controller and
> >> interrupt-controller, walk all children of the device tree,
> >> check if these in turn reference the interrupt-controller, and
> >> if they do, loop over the interrupts used by that child and
> >> perform gpio_reques() and gpio_direction_input() on these,
> >> making them unreachable from the GPIO side.
> > 
> > Ugh, that's pretty awful, and it doesn't actually solve the root
> > problem of the GPIO and IRQ subsystems not cooperating. It's also a
> > very DT-centric solution even though we're going to see the exact same
> > issue on ACPI machines.
> 
> The problem is that the patches for OMAP that I applied and now have had to
> revert solves it in an even uglier way, leading to breaking boards, as was
> noticed.
> 
> The approach in this patch has the potential to actually work without
> regressing a bunch of boards...
> 
> Whether this is a problem in ACPI or not remains to be seen, but I'm not
> sure about that. Device trees allows for a GPIO line to be used as an
> interrupt source and GPIO line orthogonally, and that is the root of this
> problem. Does ACPI have the same problem, or does it impose natural
> restrictions on such use cases?
> 
> > We have to solve the problem in a better way than that. Rearranging
> > your patch description, here are some of the points you brought up so
> > I can comment on them...
> > 
> >> This has the following undesired effects:
> >> 
> >> - The GPIOlib subsystem is not aware that the line is in use
> >>   and willingly lets some other consumer perform gpio_request()
> >>   on it, leading to a complex resource conflict if it occurs.
> > 
> > If a gpio line is being both requested as a gpio and used as an
> > interrupt line, then either a) it's a bug, or b) the gpio line needs
> > to be used as input only so it is compatible with irq usage. b) should
> > be supportable.
> 
> Yes this is what I'm saying too I think...
> 
> The bug in (a) manifested itself in the OMAP patch with no real solution in
> sight.
> 
> >> - The GPIO debugfs file claims this GPIO line is "free".
> > 
> > Surely we can fix this. I still don't see a problem of having the
> > controller request the gpio when it is claimed as an irq if we can get
> > around the problem of another user performing a /valid/ request on the
> > same GPIO line. The solution may be to have a special form of request
> > or flag that allows it to be shared.
> 
> I don't see how sharing works here, or how another user, i.e. another one
> than the user wanting to recieve the IRQ, can validly request such a line?
> What would the usecase for that valid request be?

When the GPIO is wired to a status signal (such as an MMC card detect signal) 
the driver might want to read the state of the signal independently of the 
interrupt handler.

> Basically I believe these two things need to be exclusive in the DT world:
> 
> A: request_irq(a resource passed from "interrupts");
>      -> core implicitly performs gpio_request()
>          gpio_direction_input()
> 
> B: gpio_request(a resource passed from "gpios");
>      gpio_direction_input()
>      request_irq(gpio_to_irq())
> 
> Never both. And IIUC that was what happened in the OMAP case.

Isn't the core issue that we can translate a GPIO number to an IRQ number, but 
not the other way around ? If that could be done, we could request the GPIO 
and configure it as an input when the IRQ is requested.

> >> - The line direction of the interrupt GPIO line is not
> >> 
> >>   explicitly set as input, even though it is obvious that such
> >>   a line need to be set up in this way, often making the system
> >>   depend on boot-on defaults for this kind of settings.
> > 
> > Should also be solvable if the gpio request problem is solved.
> 
> Agreed...

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart