• Trent Piepho's avatar
    leds: Add options to have GPIO LEDs start on or keep their state · ed88bae6
    Trent Piepho authored
    
    
    There already is a "default-on" trigger but there are problems with it.
    
    For one, it's a inefficient way to do it and requires led trigger support
    to be compiled in.
    
    But the real reason is that is produces a glitch on the LED.  The GPIO is
    allocate with the LED *off*, then *later* when the trigger runs it is
    turned back on.  If the LED was already on via the GPIO's reset default or
    action of the firmware, this produces a glitch where the LED goes from on
    to off to on.  While normally this is fast enough that it wouldn't be
    noticeable to a human observer, there are still serious problems.
    
    One is that there may be something else on the GPIO line, like a hardware
    alarm or watchdog, that is fast enough to notice the glitch.
    
    Another is that the kernel may panic before the LED is turned back on, thus
    hanging with the LED in the wrong state.  This is not just speculation, but
    actually happened to me with an embedded system that has an LED which
    should turn off when the kernel finishes booting, which was left in the
    incorrect state due to a bug in the OF LED binding code.
    
    We also let GPIO LEDs get their initial value from whatever the current
    state of the GPIO line is.  On some systems the LEDs are put into some
    state by the firmware or hardware before Linux boots, and it is desired to
    have them keep this state which is otherwise unknown to Linux.
    
    This requires that the underlying GPIO driver support reading the value of
    output GPIOs.  Some drivers support this and some do not.
    
    The platform device binding gains a field in the platform data
    "default_state" that controls this.  There are three constants defined to
    select from on, off, or keeping the current state.  The OpenFirmware
    binding uses a property named "default-state" that can be set to "on",
    "off", or "keep".  The default if the property isn't present is off.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarTrent Piepho <xyzzy@speakeasy.org>
    Acked-by: default avatarGrant Likely <grant.likely@secretlab.ca>
    Acked-by: default avatarWolfram Sang <w.sang@pengutronix.de>
    Acked-by: default avatarSean MacLennan <smaclennan@pikatech.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarRichard Purdie <rpurdie@linux.intel.com>
    ed88bae6
led.txt 1.9 KB