Raspberry Pi is really an interesting device for its support of so many features in such a small and simple formfactor. If the GPIO expansion header can be accessed in the same way as a normal memory-mapped interface, more projects will be able to use it as a development platform. A few questions regarding this:
Can the GPIO pins on the header be aggregated into a single memory access instruction in its hardward (chip)? If not (that I assume), can some expansion board/circuit be attached to the connector to modify the behavior such that it can have support to such an access method? How do you see such a design?
If all these seem to be impossible or too much hassle, I see a viable solution is to wrap the access into a library or abstraction layer. Has such kind of work existed? Is there any similar work? I'm not looking at the userland access, I'm thinking of some kind of kernel library that makes it easy to develop kernel level drivers based on R-Pi.
Thank you in advance for your comments.