Root/Documentation/spi/spidev

1SPI devices have a limited userspace API, supporting basic half-duplex
2read() and write() access to SPI slave devices. Using ioctl() requests,
3full duplex transfers and device I/O configuration are also available.
4
5    #include <fcntl.h>
6    #include <unistd.h>
7    #include <sys/ioctl.h>
8    #include <linux/types.h>
9    #include <linux/spi/spidev.h>
10
11Some reasons you might want to use this programming interface include:
12
13 * Prototyping in an environment that's not crash-prone; stray pointers
14   in userspace won't normally bring down any Linux system.
15
16 * Developing simple protocols used to talk to microcontrollers acting
17   as SPI slaves, which you may need to change quite often.
18
19Of course there are drivers that can never be written in userspace, because
20they need to access kernel interfaces (such as IRQ handlers or other layers
21of the driver stack) that are not accessible to userspace.
22
23
24DEVICE CREATION, DRIVER BINDING
25===============================
26The simplest way to arrange to use this driver is to just list it in the
27spi_board_info for a device as the driver it should use: the "modalias"
28entry is "spidev", matching the name of the driver exposing this API.
29Set up the other device characteristics (bits per word, SPI clocking,
30chipselect polarity, etc) as usual, so you won't always need to override
31them later.
32
33(Sysfs also supports userspace driven binding/unbinding of drivers to
34devices. That mechanism might be supported here in the future.)
35
36When you do that, the sysfs node for the SPI device will include a child
37device node with a "dev" attribute that will be understood by udev or mdev.
38(Larger systems will have "udev". Smaller ones may configure "mdev" into
39busybox; it's less featureful, but often enough.) For a SPI device with
40chipselect C on bus B, you should see:
41
42    /dev/spidevB.C ... character special device, major number 153 with
43    a dynamically chosen minor device number. This is the node
44    that userspace programs will open, created by "udev" or "mdev".
45
46    /sys/devices/.../spiB.C ... as usual, the SPI device node will
47    be a child of its SPI master controller.
48
49    /sys/class/spidev/spidevB.C ... created when the "spidev" driver
50    binds to that device. (Directory or symlink, based on whether
51    or not you enabled the "deprecated sysfs files" Kconfig option.)
52
53Do not try to manage the /dev character device special file nodes by hand.
54That's error prone, and you'd need to pay careful attention to system
55security issues; udev/mdev should already be configured securely.
56
57If you unbind the "spidev" driver from that device, those two "spidev" nodes
58(in sysfs and in /dev) should automatically be removed (respectively by the
59kernel and by udev/mdev). You can unbind by removing the "spidev" driver
60module, which will affect all devices using this driver. You can also unbind
61by having kernel code remove the SPI device, probably by removing the driver
62for its SPI controller (so its spi_master vanishes).
63
64Since this is a standard Linux device driver -- even though it just happens
65to expose a low level API to userspace -- it can be associated with any number
66of devices at a time. Just provide one spi_board_info record for each such
67SPI device, and you'll get a /dev device node for each device.
68
69
70BASIC CHARACTER DEVICE API
71==========================
72Normal open() and close() operations on /dev/spidevB.D files work as you
73would expect.
74
75Standard read() and write() operations are obviously only half-duplex, and
76the chipselect is deactivated between those operations. Full-duplex access,
77and composite operation without chipselect de-activation, is available using
78the SPI_IOC_MESSAGE(N) request.
79
80Several ioctl() requests let your driver read or override the device's current
81settings for data transfer parameters:
82
83    SPI_IOC_RD_MODE, SPI_IOC_WR_MODE ... pass a pointer to a byte which will
84    return (RD) or assign (WR) the SPI transfer mode. Use the constants
85    SPI_MODE_0..SPI_MODE_3; or if you prefer you can combine SPI_CPOL
86    (clock polarity, idle high iff this is set) or SPI_CPHA (clock phase,
87    sample on trailing edge iff this is set) flags.
88
89    SPI_IOC_RD_LSB_FIRST, SPI_IOC_WR_LSB_FIRST ... pass a pointer to a byte
90    which will return (RD) or assign (WR) the bit justification used to
91    transfer SPI words. Zero indicates MSB-first; other values indicate
92    the less common LSB-first encoding. In both cases the specified value
93    is right-justified in each word, so that unused (TX) or undefined (RX)
94    bits are in the MSBs.
95
96    SPI_IOC_RD_BITS_PER_WORD, SPI_IOC_WR_BITS_PER_WORD ... pass a pointer to
97    a byte which will return (RD) or assign (WR) the number of bits in
98    each SPI transfer word. The value zero signifies eight bits.
99
100    SPI_IOC_RD_MAX_SPEED_HZ, SPI_IOC_WR_MAX_SPEED_HZ ... pass a pointer to a
101    u32 which will return (RD) or assign (WR) the maximum SPI transfer
102    speed, in Hz. The controller can't necessarily assign that specific
103    clock speed.
104
105NOTES:
106
107    - At this time there is no async I/O support; everything is purely
108      synchronous.
109
110    - There's currently no way to report the actual bit rate used to
111      shift data to/from a given device.
112
113    - From userspace, you can't currently change the chip select polarity;
114      that could corrupt transfers to other devices sharing the SPI bus.
115      Each SPI device is deselected when it's not in active use, allowing
116      other drivers to talk to other devices.
117
118    - There's a limit on the number of bytes each I/O request can transfer
119      to the SPI device. It defaults to one page, but that can be changed
120      using a module parameter.
121
122    - Because SPI has no low-level transfer acknowledgement, you usually
123      won't see any I/O errors when talking to a non-existent device.
124
125
126FULL DUPLEX CHARACTER DEVICE API
127================================
128
129See the spidev_fdx.c sample program for one example showing the use of the
130full duplex programming interface. (Although it doesn't perform a full duplex
131transfer.) The model is the same as that used in the kernel spi_sync()
132request; the individual transfers offer the same capabilities as are
133available to kernel drivers (except that it's not asynchronous).
134
135The example shows one half-duplex RPC-style request and response message.
136These requests commonly require that the chip not be deselected between
137the request and response. Several such requests could be chained into
138a single kernel request, even allowing the chip to be deselected after
139each response. (Other protocol options include changing the word size
140and bitrate for each transfer segment.)
141
142To make a full duplex request, provide both rx_buf and tx_buf for the
143same transfer. It's even OK if those are the same buffer.
144

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