1 Specifying GPIO information for devices
2 ============================================
7 Nodes that makes use of GPIOs should specify them using one or more
8 properties, each containing a 'gpio-list':
10 gpio-list ::= <single-gpio> [gpio-list]
11 single-gpio ::= <gpio-phandle> <gpio-specifier>
12 gpio-phandle : phandle to gpio controller node
13 gpio-specifier : Array of #gpio-cells specifying specific gpio
16 GPIO properties should be named "[<name>-]gpios", with <name> being the purpose
17 of this GPIO for the device. While a non-existent <name> is considered valid
18 for compatibility reasons (resolving to the "gpios" property), it is not allowed
19 for new bindings. Also, GPIO properties named "[<name>-]gpio" are valid and old
20 bindings use it, but are only supported for compatibility reasons and should not
21 be used for newer bindings since it has been deprecated.
23 GPIO properties can contain one or more GPIO phandles, but only in exceptional
24 cases should they contain more than one. If your device uses several GPIOs with
25 distinct functions, reference each of them under its own property, giving it a
26 meaningful name. The only case where an array of GPIOs is accepted is when
27 several GPIOs serve the same function (e.g. a parallel data line).
29 The exact purpose of each gpios property must be documented in the device tree
30 binding of the device.
32 The following example could be used to describe GPIO pins used as device enable
33 and bit-banged data signals:
45 enable-gpios = <&gpio2 2>;
46 data-gpios = <&gpio1 12 0>,
51 Note that gpio-specifier length is controller dependent. In the
52 above example, &gpio1 uses 2 cells to specify a gpio, while &gpio2
55 gpio-specifier may encode: bank, pin position inside the bank,
56 whether pin is open-drain and whether pin is logically inverted.
58 Exact meaning of each specifier cell is controller specific, and must
59 be documented in the device tree binding for the device.
61 Most controllers are however specifying a generic flag bitfield
62 in the last cell, so for these, use the macros defined in
63 include/dt-bindings/gpio/gpio.h whenever possible:
65 Example of a node using GPIOs:
68 enable-gpios = <&qe_pio_e 18 GPIO_ACTIVE_HIGH>;
71 GPIO_ACTIVE_HIGH is 0, so in this example gpio-specifier is "18 0" and encodes
72 GPIO pin number, and GPIO flags as accepted by the "qe_pio_e" gpio-controller.
74 Optional standard bitfield specifiers for the last cell:
76 - Bit 0: 0 means active high, 1 means active low
77 - Bit 1: 0 mean push-pull wiring, see:
78 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push-pull_output
79 1 means single-ended wiring, see:
80 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-ended_triode
81 - Bit 2: 0 means open-source, 1 means open drain, see:
82 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_collector
83 - Bit 3: 0 means the output should be maintained during sleep/low-power mode
84 1 means the output state can be lost during sleep/low-power mode
86 1.1) GPIO specifier best practices
87 ----------------------------------
89 A gpio-specifier should contain a flag indicating the GPIO polarity; active-
90 high or active-low. If it does, the following best practices should be
93 The gpio-specifier's polarity flag should represent the physical level at the
94 GPIO controller that achieves (or represents, for inputs) a logically asserted
95 value at the device. The exact definition of logically asserted should be
96 defined by the binding for the device. If the board inverts the signal between
97 the GPIO controller and the device, then the gpio-specifier will represent the
98 opposite physical level than the signal at the device's pin.
100 When the device's signal polarity is configurable, the binding for the
103 a) Define a single static polarity for the signal, with the expectation that
104 any software using that binding would statically program the device to use
105 that signal polarity.
107 The static choice of polarity may be either:
109 a1) (Preferred) Dictated by a binding-specific DT property.
113 a2) Defined statically by the DT binding itself.
115 In particular, the polarity cannot be derived from the gpio-specifier, since
116 that would prevent the DT from separately representing the two orthogonal
117 concepts of configurable signal polarity in the device, and possible board-
118 level signal inversion.
122 b) Pick a single option for device signal polarity, and document this choice
123 in the binding. The gpio-specifier should represent the polarity of the signal
124 (at the GPIO controller) assuming that the device is configured for this
125 particular signal polarity choice. If software chooses to program the device
126 to generate or receive a signal of the opposite polarity, software will be
127 responsible for correctly interpreting (inverting) the GPIO signal at the GPIO
130 2) gpio-controller nodes
131 ------------------------
133 Every GPIO controller node must contain both an empty "gpio-controller"
134 property, and a #gpio-cells integer property, which indicates the number of
135 cells in a gpio-specifier.
137 Some system-on-chips (SoCs) use the concept of GPIO banks. A GPIO bank is an
138 instance of a hardware IP core on a silicon die, usually exposed to the
139 programmer as a coherent range of I/O addresses. Usually each such bank is
140 exposed in the device tree as an individual gpio-controller node, reflecting
141 the fact that the hardware was synthesized by reusing the same IP block a
144 Optionally, a GPIO controller may have a "ngpios" property. This property
145 indicates the number of in-use slots of available slots for GPIOs. The
146 typical example is something like this: the hardware register is 32 bits
147 wide, but only 18 of the bits have a physical counterpart. The driver is
148 generally written so that all 32 bits can be used, but the IP block is reused
149 in a lot of designs, some using all 32 bits, some using 18 and some using
150 12. In this case, setting "ngpios = <18>;" informs the driver that only the
151 first 18 GPIOs, at local offset 0 .. 17, are in use.
153 If these GPIOs do not happen to be the first N GPIOs at offset 0...N-1, an
154 additional bitmask is needed to specify which GPIOs are actually in use,
155 and which are dummies. The bindings for this case has not yet been
156 specified, but should be specified if/when such hardware appears.
158 Optionally, a GPIO controller may have a "gpio-line-names" property. This is
159 an array of strings defining the names of the GPIO lines going out of the
160 GPIO controller. This name should be the most meaningful producer name
161 for the system, such as a rail name indicating the usage. Package names
162 such as pin name are discouraged: such lines have opaque names (since they
163 are by definition generic purpose) and such names are usually not very
164 helpful. For example "MMC-CD", "Red LED Vdd" and "ethernet reset" are
165 reasonable line names as they describe what the line is used for. "GPIO0"
166 is not a good name to give to a GPIO line. Placeholders are discouraged:
167 rather use the "" (blank string) if the use of the GPIO line is undefined
168 in your design. The names are assigned starting from line offset 0 from
169 left to right from the passed array. An incomplete array (where the number
170 of passed named are less than ngpios) will still be used up until the last
171 provided valid line index.
175 gpio-controller@00000000 {
177 reg = <0x00000000 0x1000>;
181 gpio-line-names = "MMC-CD", "MMC-WP", "VDD eth", "RST eth", "LED R",
182 "LED G", "LED B", "Col A", "Col B", "Col C", "Col D",
183 "Row A", "Row B", "Row C", "Row D", "NMI button",
187 The GPIO chip may contain GPIO hog definitions. GPIO hogging is a mechanism
188 providing automatic GPIO request and configuration as part of the
189 gpio-controller's driver probe function.
191 Each GPIO hog definition is represented as a child node of the GPIO controller.
193 - gpio-hog: A property specifying that this child node represents a GPIO hog.
194 - gpios: Store the GPIO information (id, flags, ...) for each GPIO to
195 affect. Shall contain an integer multiple of the number of cells
196 specified in its parent node (GPIO controller node).
197 Only one of the following properties scanned in the order shown below.
198 This means that when multiple properties are present they will be searched
199 in the order presented below and the first match is taken as the intended
201 - input: A property specifying to set the GPIO direction as input.
202 - output-low A property specifying to set the GPIO direction as output with
204 - output-high A property specifying to set the GPIO direction as output with
208 - line-name: The GPIO label name. If not present the node name is used.
210 Example of two SOC GPIO banks defined as gpio-controller nodes:
212 qe_pio_a: gpio-controller@1400 {
213 compatible = "fsl,qe-pario-bank-a", "fsl,qe-pario-bank";
222 line-name = "foo-bar-gpio";
226 qe_pio_e: gpio-controller@1460 {
227 compatible = "fsl,qe-pario-bank-e", "fsl,qe-pario-bank";
233 2.1) gpio- and pin-controller interaction
234 -----------------------------------------
236 Some or all of the GPIOs provided by a GPIO controller may be routed to pins
237 on the package via a pin controller. This allows muxing those pins between
238 GPIO and other functions.
240 It is useful to represent which GPIOs correspond to which pins on which pin
241 controllers. The gpio-ranges property described below represents this, and
242 contains information structures as follows:
244 gpio-range-list ::= <single-gpio-range> [gpio-range-list]
245 single-gpio-range ::= <numeric-gpio-range> | <named-gpio-range>
246 numeric-gpio-range ::=
247 <pinctrl-phandle> <gpio-base> <pinctrl-base> <count>
248 named-gpio-range ::= <pinctrl-phandle> <gpio-base> '<0 0>'
249 pinctrl-phandle : phandle to pin controller node
250 gpio-base : Base GPIO ID in the GPIO controller
251 pinctrl-base : Base pinctrl pin ID in the pin controller
252 count : The number of GPIOs/pins in this range
254 The "pin controller node" mentioned above must conform to the bindings
255 described in ../pinctrl/pinctrl-bindings.txt.
257 In case named gpio ranges are used (ranges with both <pinctrl-base> and
258 <count> set to 0), the property gpio-ranges-group-names contains one string
259 for every single-gpio-range in gpio-ranges:
260 gpiorange-names-list ::= <gpiorange-name> [gpiorange-names-list]
261 gpiorange-name : Name of the pingroup associated to the GPIO range in
262 the respective pin controller.
264 Elements of gpiorange-names-list corresponding to numeric ranges contain
265 the empty string. Elements of gpiorange-names-list corresponding to named
266 ranges contain the name of a pin group defined in the respective pin
267 controller. The number of pins/GPIOs in the range is the number of pins in
270 Previous versions of this binding required all pin controller nodes that
271 were referenced by any gpio-ranges property to contain a property named
272 #gpio-range-cells with value <3>. This requirement is now deprecated.
273 However, that property may still exist in older device trees for
274 compatibility reasons, and would still be required even in new device
275 trees that need to be compatible with older software.
279 qe_pio_e: gpio-controller@1460 {
281 compatible = "fsl,qe-pario-bank-e", "fsl,qe-pario-bank";
284 gpio-ranges = <&pinctrl1 0 20 10>, <&pinctrl2 10 50 20>;
287 Here, a single GPIO controller has GPIOs 0..9 routed to pin controller
288 pinctrl1's pins 20..29, and GPIOs 10..29 routed to pin controller pinctrl2's
293 gpio_pio_i: gpio-controller@14B0 {
295 compatible = "fsl,qe-pario-bank-e", "fsl,qe-pario-bank";
298 gpio-ranges = <&pinctrl1 0 20 10>,
302 gpio-ranges-group-names = "",
308 Here, three GPIO ranges are defined wrt. two pin controllers. pinctrl1 GPIO
309 ranges are defined using pin numbers whereas the GPIO ranges wrt. pinctrl2
310 are named "foo" and "bar".