This patch adds framework support for PWM (pulse width modulation) devices.
The is a barebone PWM API already in the kernel under include/linux/pwm.h,
but it does not allow for multiple drivers as each of them implements the
pwm_*() functions.
There are other PWM framework patches around from Bill Gatliff. Unlike
his framework this one does not change the existing API for PWMs so that
this framework can act as a drop in replacement for the existing API.
Why another framework?
Several people argue that there should not be another framework for PWMs
but they should be integrated into one of the existing frameworks like led
or hwmon. Unlike these frameworks the PWM framework is agnostic to the
purpose of the PWM. In fact, a PWM can drive a LED, but this makes the
LED framework a user of a PWM, like already done in leds-pwm.c. The gpio
framework also is not suitable for PWMs. Every gpio could be turned into
a PWM using timer based toggling, but on the other hand not every PWM hardware
device can be turned into a gpio due to the lack of hardware capabilities.
This patch does not try to improve the PWM API yet, this could be done in
subsequent patches.
Signed-off-by: Sascha Hauer <s.hauer@pengutronix.de>
Acked-by: Kurt Van Dijck <kurt.van.dijck@eia.be>
Reviewed-by: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Reviewed-by: Matthias Kaehlcke <matthias@kaehlcke.net>
Reviewed-by: Mark Brown <broonie@opensource.wolfsonmicro.com>
Reviewed-by: Shawn Guo <shawn.guo@linaro.org>
[thierry.reding@avionic-design.de: fixup typos, kerneldoc comments]
Signed-off-by: Thierry Reding <thierry.reding@avionic-design.de>
