How to interact with the Linux PCA953X.c driver? How does one utilize this driver? - linux-device-driver

Question

I have a PCA9535 GPIO Expander board connected through I²C to my Raspberry Pi. I am able to set the GPIO expander output pins (to high) using the i2cset command:
sudo i2cset 1 0x20 0x02 0xFF // 0x20 (gpio expander), and register 0x02
I came across a kernel driver for the PCA953X and loaded the kernel module gpio-pca953x.ko + modified the /boot/config.txt to include the dts overlay for the expander. When I run i2detect -y 1 (for i2c-1 bus), I can see "UU" at the 0x20 slave address, which corroborates that the driver is managing it.
If I wanted to do something comparable to what I did with the i2cset command programmatically, what API / interface should I use such that I make use of the PCA953X driver that's installed? As you can see from the code below, nothing there suggests that I would be utilizing PCA953X:
int file;
int adapter_nr = 1;
char filename[20];
snprintf(filename, 19, "/dev/i2c-%d", adapter_nr);
file = open(filename, O_RDWR);
if (file < 0) {
exit(1);
}
// Writes 0xFF to register 0x02
uint8_t cmd[2] = {0x02, 0XFF};
struct i2c_msg msg = {
.addr = 0x20,
.flags = 0,
.len = sizeof(cmd)/sizeof(uint8_t),
.buf = cmd
};
struct i2c_rdwr_ioctl_data tx = {
.msgs = &msg,
.nmsgs = 1
};
ioctl(file, I2C_RDWR, &tx);
Is there a programming route that involves utilizing the PCA953X driver? What does having that module actually do?

Answer 1

Thanks to #TomV for pointing it out in the comments. The PCA953X driver provides a new character device in the form of "gpiochipN". In my case, it was gpiochip2. I had not noticed this extra gpiochip in /dev as I was not looking for it. Because this is a character device, I was able to use ioctl to interact with the lines:
int fd, ret;
fd = open("/dev/gpiochip2", O_RDONLY);
if (fd < 0) {
printf("Unable to open: %s", strerror(errno));
return;
}
struct gpiohandle_request req;
req.lineoffsets[0] = 0;
req.lineoffsets[1] = 1;
req.lineoffsets[2] = 2;
req.lineoffsets[3] = 3;
req.lineoffsets[4] = 4;
req.lineoffsets[5] = 5;
req.lineoffsets[6] = 6;
req.lineoffsets[7] = 7;
req.lines = 8;
req.flags = GPIOHANDLE_REQUEST_OUTPUT;
ret = ioctl(fd, GPIO_GET_LINEHANDLE_IOCTL, &req);
if (-1 == ret) {
printf("Failed to get line handle:%s\n", strerror(ret));
close(fd);
return;
}
// Sets all 8 lines to high (equivalent to setting register 0x3 to 0b11111111 or 0xFF)
struct gpiohandle_data data;
data.values[0] = 1;
data.values[1] = 1;
data.values[2] = 1;
data.values[3] = 1;
data.values[4] = 1;
data.values[5] = 1;
data.values[6] = 1;
data.values[7] = 1;
ret = ioctl(req.fd, GPIOHANDLE_SET_LINE_VALUES_IOCTL, &data);
if (-1 == ret) {
printf("Failed to set line value\n");
}
else {
close(req.fd);
}
close(fd);
The above code interacts with the gpiochip2 character device, which is made possible by having the PCA953X installed. Without it, I would have to read and write to the registers through the i2c bus as was posted in my original question.