On Fri, May 24, 2013 at 1:50 PM, Christian Ruppert
[off-list ref] wrote:

I haven't understood how to associate GPIOs to
other functions, however: Our hardware pin controller makes GPIO pins
available depending on the configuration of the non-GPIO interfaces.
This means that in many configurations, GPIO banks are only partially
available because some pins are used for other purposes. We can't expect
our customers to manually change the pin assignments in the device tree
in order to take this into account for every PCB.

But what is it your customers do when customizing a board then?

Part of the promise of the device tree is to make it easy for downstream
users to customize the kernel, *especially* for different boards/systems
using the same SoC, for example. It is very much intended as a
customization tools for embedded developers getting boards from
a chipset vendor.

Maybe I don't understand what is meant by changing the pin
assignments above ...

Yours,
Linus Walleij