An i2c bus can be divided into segments which can be selectively connected and disconnected from the main bus. This is usually done to enable using multiple slave devices having the same address, by isolating the devices onto separate bus segments, only one of which is connected to the main bus at once.
There are several types of i2c bus muxes, which break down into two general categories
- Muxes which are themselves i2c slaves. These devices respond to i2c commands on their upstream bus, and based on those commands, connect various downstream buses to the upstream. In newbus terms, they are both a child of an iicbus and the parent of one or more iicbus instances.
- Muxes which are not i2c devices themselves. Such devices are part of the i2c bus electrically, but in newbus terms their parent is some other bus. The association with the upstream bus must be established by separate metadata (such as FDT data).
In both cases, the mux driver has one or more iicbus child instances representing the downstream buses. The mux driver implements the iicbus_if interface, as if it were an iichb host bridge/i2c controller driver. It services the IO requests sent to it by forwarding them to the iicbus instance representing the upstream bus, after electrically connecting the upstream bus to the downstream bus that hosts the i2c slave device which made the IO request.
The net effect is automatic mux switching which is transparent to slaves on the downstream buses. They just do i2c IO they way they normally do, and the bus is electrically connected for the duration of the IO and then idled when it is complete.
The existing iicbus_if callback() method is enhanced so that the parameter passed to it can be a struct which contains a device_t for the requesting bus and slave devices. This change is done by adding a flag that indicates the extra values are present, and making the flags field the first field of a new args struct. If the flag is set, the iichb or mux driver can recast the pointer-to-flags into a pointer-to-struct and access the extra fields. Thus abi compatibility with older drivers is retained (but a mux cannot exist on the bus with the older iicbus driver in use.)
A new set of core support routines exists in iicbus.c. This code will help implement mux drivers for any type of mux hardware by supplying all the boilerplate code that forwards IO requests upstream. It also has code for parsing metadata and instantiating the child iicbus instances based on it.
Two new hardware mux drivers are added. The ltc430x driver supports the LTC4305/4306 mux chips which are controlled via i2c commands. The iic_gpiomux driver supports any mux hardware which is controlled by manipulating the state of one or more gpio pins.