[PATCH] hwmon: (ads7871) Propagate SPI errors in voltage_show

From: Tabrez Ahmed

Date: Sun Mar 08 2026 - 08:47:30 EST


The voltage_show() function previously ignored negative error codes
returned by the underlying SPI read/write functions. Because negative
numbers have their most significant bits set in two's complement, a
failed SPI read returning -EIO (-5) would incorrectly evaluate to true
when masked with MUX_CNV_BM (0x80).

This would cause the driver to enter the polling loop even when the SPI bus
failed, eventually returning a misleading -ETIMEDOUT error to userspace
instead of the actual hardware error. Furthermore, the return values of
the initial SPI write and the final 16-bit SPI read were completely
ignored.

Add proper error checking after every SPI operation to ensure hardware
failures are immediately propagated back to userspace.

Suggested-by: Guenter Roeck <linux@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Signed-off-by: Tabrez Ahmed <tabreztalks@xxxxxxxxx>
---
drivers/hwmon/ads7871.c | 12 ++++++++++--
1 file changed, 10 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)

diff --git a/drivers/hwmon/ads7871.c b/drivers/hwmon/ads7871.c
index 753bf77ce19b4..9bfdf9e6bcd77 100644
--- a/drivers/hwmon/ads7871.c
+++ b/drivers/hwmon/ads7871.c
@@ -104,10 +104,14 @@ static ssize_t voltage_show(struct device *dev, struct device_attribute *da,
*/
/*MUX_M3_BM forces single ended*/
/*This is also where the gain of the PGA would be set*/
- ads7871_write_reg8(spi, REG_GAIN_MUX,
- (MUX_CNV_BM | MUX_M3_BM | channel));
+ ret = ads7871_write_reg8(spi, REG_GAIN_MUX,
+ (MUX_CNV_BM | MUX_M3_BM | channel));
+ if (ret < 0)
+ return ret;

ret = ads7871_read_reg8(spi, REG_GAIN_MUX);
+ if (ret < 0)
+ return ret;
mux_cnv = ((ret & MUX_CNV_BM) >> MUX_CNV_BV);
/*
* on 400MHz arm9 platform the conversion
@@ -116,12 +120,16 @@ static ssize_t voltage_show(struct device *dev, struct device_attribute *da,
while ((i < 2) && mux_cnv) {
i++;
ret = ads7871_read_reg8(spi, REG_GAIN_MUX);
+ if (ret < 0)
+ return ret;
mux_cnv = ((ret & MUX_CNV_BM) >> MUX_CNV_BV);
msleep_interruptible(1);
}

if (mux_cnv == 0) {
val = ads7871_read_reg16(spi, REG_LS_BYTE);
+ if (val < 0)
+ return val;
/*result in volts*10000 = (val/8192)*2.5*10000*/
val = ((val >> 2) * 25000) / 8192;
return sysfs_emit(buf, "%d\n", val);
--
2.43.0