Re: [GIT PULL] Ambient Light Sensors subsystem

[Linus Walleij <linus.ml.walleij@gmail.com>]

2010/3/3 Dima Zavin <dmitriyz@google.com>:

> how does this deal with hybrid devices?

As any hybrid device, a drivers/mfd spawns multiple sensors, als,
accelerometer, voltage level, you name it.

> I definitely see the need for what you guys are trying to accomplish.
> For example, currently, we use an input device for reporting events,
> and a separate misc device node for control
> (enable/disable/configure). It's definitely suboptimal, but there
> currently isn't anything there would let us do things cleanly.

Are you registering your misc node from an mfd device then?

> I would love to work with you to design something more generic.

You can design forever, people need this now. (But we'd love
to see the patches!) It's better to refactor the day something
better is in place IMHO. Also I see no real clash. The userspace
interface will likely be the same (input subsystem) so what's the
problem?

In the drivers/staging/iio in the -next tree you can find something
more generic for industrial I/O including ADCs, triggers and
some sensors. I pointed out sometime last month that this
has the problem of exposing only userland interfaces and no
kernel-internal interfaces for the actual devices (just sysfs entries),
so the current ALS subsystem cannot fit into it, for example.

Linus Walleij