Plans for standardizing digital/analog I/O?

[Luiz Otavio O Souza]

On 16 April 2014 00:16, Brian J. McGovern wrote:
> This is probably best suited for a more generic list, but given digital
> and analog I/O are at the core of many of the ARM based development
> boards out there, I figured I'd ask here first...
>
> Is anyone talking about standardizing the various I/O framworks that
> exist/are being built? Or, perhaps more correctly,standardizing the
> _interfaces_ to the various I/O frameworks?
>
> To use the BBB as an example platform, the digital I/O work seems to use
> the gpio[ctl] framework, while the ADC uses sysctl under the new/current
> driver. I haven't looked at PWM outputs yet. Finally, given that I have
> passthrough driver for the various Velleman I/O boards (the 110, 140,
> and 167) which allow the application to speak the various protocols to
> the boards (not to mention allowing me to plug in 5V and 12V things in
> to the 1.8V BBB world without much modification), I'm discovering there
> are at least 6 ways to do I/O in my world, and I'm guessing there are a
> lot more if I were to keep digging.
>
> So, I'm curious if anyone is working on or proposing a more generic, or
> at least standard, kernel interface to plug in to? Perhaps sysctls are a
> way to go, or a set of /dev/hwio/* entries. I'd also be interested in
> hearing anyone's thoughts on the matter, should I decide to go off and
> build something, either in kernel or user space, to unify these spaces
> for the ease of application programming.
>                    -B
>

Hi Brian,

Yes, i do think we could benefit from having such standards for the
various I/O options. I have been thinking on this and have some ideas
that i would like to see implemented. That being said, i don't know
when i will be able to tackle with this. But sure, help is very
welcome.

Regards,
Luiz