Hello all,...
More and more devices these days come with some sort of GPIO interface, and more and more drivers within the kernel could make use of a common way of accessing pins on such an interface, not to mention userspace apps. For example, we have the I2C, LED, and SPI subsystems that each could drive a device that's actually connected to some GPIO pins somewhere.
I propose to develop a common way of registering and accessing GPIO pins on various devices. Now I'm no hardware expert, but I do like to dabble a bit and would love to see such a system be developed. Most people tend to attach stuff like LCD displays to their parallel ports, but GPIOs are much better suited to such a purpose than a parallel port. Some (out of tree) drivers even emulate a parallel interface in order that userspace software can be fooled to use the GPIO pins as a parallel port. In my view, this is ugly.
So, if anyone likes this idea and/or has some comments, please voice your opinions! With a little guidance from the masters, I'm willing to put the effort in to code such a system, but I'd really like to hear what people involved both in the hardware side and software side of GPIOs and the kernel have to say about such an interface.