Howto listen to/handle gpio state changes ? Re: [PATCH v2 2/2] drivers: gpio: add virtio-gpio guest driver

[Arnd Bergmann]

On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 9:22 PM Grygorii Strashko
<grygorii.strashko at ti.com> wrote:
> On 09/12/2020 14:53, Linus Walleij wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 12:19 PM Arnd Bergmann <arnd at kernel.org> wrote:
> >> On Wed, Dec 9, 2020 at 9:51 AM Linus Walleij <linus.walleij at linaro.org> wrote:
> >>> On Tue, Dec 8, 2020 at 3:07 PM Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult <lkml at metux.net> wrote:
> >>
> >>> What we need to understand is if your new usecase is an outlier
> >>> so it is simplest modeled by a "mock" irq_chip or we have to design
> >>> something new altogether like notifications on changes. I suspect
> >>> irq_chip would be best because all drivers using GPIOs for interrupts
> >>> are expecting interrupts, and it would be an enormous task to
> >>> change them all and really annoying to create a new mechanism
> >>> on the side.
> >>
> >> I would expect the platform abstraction to actually be close enough
> >> to a chained irqchip that it actually works: the notification should
> >> come in via vring_interrupt(), which is a normal interrupt handler
> >> that calls vq->vq.callback(), calling generic_handle_irq() (and
> >> possibly chained_irq_enter()/chained_irq_exit() around it) like the
> >> other gpio drivers do should just work here I think, and if it did
> >> not, then I would expect this to be just a bug in the driver rather
> >> than something missing in the gpio framework.
> >
> > Performance/latency-wise that would also be strongly encouraged.
> >
> > Tglx isn't super-happy about the chained interrupts at times, as they
> > can create really nasty bugs, but a pure IRQ in fastpath of some
> > kinde is preferable and intuitive either way.
>
> In my opinion the problem here is that proposed patch somehow describes Front end, but
> says nothing about Backend and overall design.
>
> What is expected to be virtualized? whole GPIO chip? or set of GPIOs from different GPIO chips?
> Most often nobody want to give Guest access to the whole GPIO chip, so, most probably, smth. similar to
> GPIO Aggregator will be needed.

I would argue that it does not matter, the virtual GPIO chip could really
be anything. Certain functions such as a gpio based keyboard require
interrupts, so it sounds useful to make them work.

     Arnd