Data types generally
You have defined two distinct types, __GPIO00portbits_t and __GPIO01portbits_t, with identical structure and closely related use. This is pointless, and it may even get in your way. I would probably do this, instead:
typedef union {
struct {
uint32_t GPIO0:1;
uint32_t GPIO1:1;
...
uint32_t GPIO17:1;
};
uint32_t w:18;
} __GPIOhalfportbits_t;
extern volatile __GPIOhalfportbits_t *PTR_GPIO00portbits;
#define GPIO00portbits (*PTR_GPIO00portbits)
extern volatile __GPIOhalfportbits_t * PTR_GPIO01portbits;
#define GPIO01portbits (*PTR_GPIO01portbits)
Note, by the way, that you need the externs if the header is going to be used in more than one .c file, and that in that case exactly one of those .c files should contain definitions you show.
Your specific request
I would also like to combine GPIO00 and GPIO01 into one stuct which can be controlled by changing GPIO0portbits.GPIO0x
It seems like you may not be maintaining the appropriate mental distinction between objects and their data types. That would explain your odd duplication of data types, and also the way you describe what you're looking for. If you want to be able to have the option to treat the data as either a full 36 bits or two 18-bit halves, then you could imagine continuing the above with something like this:
// XXX: see below
typedef union {
struct {
__GPIOhalfportbits_t group0;
__GPIOhalfportbits_t group1;
};
struct {
uint32_t GPIO0:1;
uint32_t GPIO1:1;
...
uint32_t GPIO35:1;
};
uint64_t w:36; // uint32_t isn't wide enough
} __GPIOportbits_t;
In principle, then, you might access an object of that type either by directly accessing the bits ...
__GPIOportbits_t portbits;
// ...
if (portbits.GPIO23) {
// ...
}
... or via the half-port pieces ...
if (portbits.group1.GPIO5) {
// ...
}
Something like that might work under different circumstances, but in your case, this will not work. The problem is that the number of bits in your half-port pieces is not a multiple of the number of bits in a char (8 on your hardware). The size of char is the unit in which object sizes are measured, and, accordingly, the finest possible granularity for addresses.
That means that the size of my __GPIOhalfportbits_t and your __GPIO00portbits_t and __GPIO01portbits_t is at least 24 bits, not 18 bits. Therefore, if you lay two of them out one after the other then the bitfields cannot be laid out as a contiguous 36-bit range starting at the beginning of the object. There are at least 6 (padding) bits of the first object that need to go somewhere before the bits of the second half-port object.
For substantially the same reason, there are no pointer tricks that can accomplish what you're after, either. If you have a region of 36 contiguous bits then the second half does not start on an addressible boundary, so you cannot form a pointer to it.
On the other hand, if the two halves are not contiguous in the first place, then you might be able to go with something like this:
typedef struct {
__GPIOhalfportbits_t group0;
__GPIOhalfportbits_t group1;
} __GPIOportbits_t;
You would have to pay attention to alignment of the two half-port pieces, but there is probably an implementation-specific way to get that right. Given that the underlying data (we have now assumed) is not presented as a contiguous span of 36 bits in the first place, forming a union with a 36-bit bitfield does not make sense. It might nevertheless be possible to use a union to map individual single-bit bitfields on top of that pair of structures by inserting explicit padding of the appropriate size, but you need to consider whether any of this is actually worth doing. In particular, see below.
Important other considerations
Bitfields are a tricky business in general, and C makes very few guarantees about their behavior -- many fewer than a lot of people suppose or expect. It is a particularly poor idea to use bitfields to write to hardware ports, because you cannot write fewer than CHAR_BIT bits at once, and if you're writing via a bitfield whose size is not a power-of-two multiple of CHAR_BIT then you will be writing additional bits as well, whose values are unspecified.
I generally recommend avoiding bitfields altogether, except possibly for usage of bitfields in C-language programming interfaces provided by the relevant hardware manufacturer, in a manner consistent with those interfaces' documentation.
Alternatives
You could conceivably come up with some wrapper macros for accessing the GPIO port in terms of two half ports, and even in terms of individual bits within those ports. But this answer is already long, and such a macro-centric approach would be a whole other story.
