regmap updates in 3.2

Version 3.1 of the Linux kernel was the first release to include regmap support and only included a bare minimum of features in order to ease review so version 3.2 has been a pretty big one for regmap development with some pretty major features being built on top of the core code.

  • Support for register caches – Dimitris Papastamos ported his code for rbtree and LZO caches from ASoC over to regmap. This makes it easy for drivers to cache the current values of the device registers, improving performance by eliminating reads when doing read/modify/write cycles and providing functions to restore the register cache when resuming from power down. An indexed cache type was also added but this will be removed in 3.3 as it offers no real advantage over rbtree.
  • Support for a wider range of SPI register transfer formats contributed by Lars-Peter Clausen.
  • Tracepoints supporting both register access logging and monitoring of the time spent on register I/O operations.
  • Register map dumps via debugfs to help provide diagnostic information during development.

Subscribe to Technicalities

Sign up now to get access to the library of members-only issues.
Jamie Larson
Subscribe