> To clarify: is Linux moving toward supporting only fully open hardware
> platforms? I’m
> not aware of any rule that prevents a company from upstreaming a driver that
> implements
> support for an existing hardware/firmware interface.
You are not the first to be requested to implement a clean generic
interface which is vendor neutral for these sorts of peripherals, with
firmware on the other side. Look back in the archives, there was a USB
attached microcontroller offering GPIO, I2C, SPI, etc. In the end the
vendor decided to keep with there out of tree driver. But if it had
progressed, it might of been possible for you to implement that same
protocol over rpmsg, rather than USB. They are similar. And there is
also greybus, which is also a solution in this problem space.
Andrew
