On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 05:08:57PM +0100, Linus Walleij wrote:
...

As you can see none of the text above claims that the group is
about hardware-defined groups or anything like that. The groups
are just that - a group of pins, an abstract concept of a group.

Ok, the thing gets clarified.  The concept of group is a abstract at
software level.  It does not necessarily require a pin group defined
by raw hardware underneath, which is basically my argument.

It could be drawn i UML even... maybe I'll do that for my
ELC presentation :-)

Then when we come to pinmux, which is slightly different
involving the definitions of a function and mappings between
functions and one or more pin groups as per above, which is
something completely different and seems to be what you're
discussing here?

For hardware that does handle pins in groups there are
special functions that can be used in the drivers like
configuring a whole group (which falls back to iterating
over pins if there is no such callback, showing again that
this is a theoretical concept) so if the hardware handles
pins in groups its a good idea to match group definitions
1-to-1 with these, but for hardware that doesn't there is
some freedom of how to use the groups.

I don't know if this helps though the discussion here seems
a bit contended :-/

It does help to me.  Thanks, Linus.

-- 
Regards,
Shawn