Hi Linus and Bartosz,

On Tue, Feb 18, 2020 at 4:18 PM Geert Uytterhoeven
[off-list ref] wrote:

GPIO controllers are exported to userspace using /dev/gpiochip*
character devices.  Access control to these devices is provided by
standard UNIX file system permissions, on an all-or-nothing basis:
either a GPIO controller is accessible for a user, or it is not.
Currently no mechanism exists to control access to individual GPIOs.

Hence this adds a GPIO driver to aggregate existing GPIOs, and expose
them as a new gpiochip.  This is useful for implementing access control,
and assigning a set of GPIOs to a specific user.  Furthermore, this
simplifies and hardens exporting GPIOs to a virtual machine, as the VM
can just grab the full GPIO controller, and no longer needs to care
about which GPIOs to grab and which not, reducing the attack surface.

Do you have any more comments, before I respin and post v6?

Thanks, and have a niec weekend!

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

-- 
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds