[PATCH RFC 0/9] gpio: improve support for shared GPIOs

[Dmitry Torokhov]

Hi Bartosz,

On Wed, Sep 24, 2025 at 04:51:28PM +0200, Bartosz Golaszewski wrote:
> Here's a functional RFC for improving the handling of shared GPIOs in
> linux.
> 
> Problem statement: GPIOs are implemented as a strictly exclusive
> resource in the kernel but there are lots of platforms on which single
> pin is shared by multiple devices which don't communicate so need some
> way of properly sharing access to a GPIO. What we have now is the
> GPIOD_FLAGS_BIT_NONEXCLUSIVE flag which was introduced as a hack and
> doesn't do any locking or arbitration of access - it literally just hand
> the same GPIO descriptor to all interested users.
> 
> The proposed solution is composed of three major parts: the high-level,
> shared GPIO proxy driver that arbitrates access to the shared pin and
> exposes a regular GPIO chip interface to consumers, a low-level shared
> GPIOLIB module that scans firmware nodes and creates auxiliary devices
> that attach to the proxy driver and finally a set of core GPIOLIB
> changes that plug the former into the GPIO lookup path.
> 
> The changes are implemented in a way that allows to seamlessly compile
> out any code related to sharing GPIOs for systems that don't need it.
> 
> The practical use-case for this are the powerdown GPIOs shared by
> speakers on Qualcomm db845c platform, however I have also extensively
> tested it using gpio-virtuser on arm64 qemu with various DT
> configurations.

How is this different from the existing gpio-backed regulator/supply?
IMO GPIOs are naturally exclusive-use resources (in cases when you need
to control them, not simply read their state), and when there is a need
to share them there are more appropriate abstractions that are built on
top of GPIOs...

Thanks.

-- 
Dmitry