[PATCH v4] checkpatch: warn on uppercase N/Y/M as Kconfig tristate literals

From: Andrew Jones

Date: Wed May 27 2026 - 10:30:13 EST


Kconfig tristate literals are always lowercase ('n', 'y', 'm') and
uppercase N/Y/M are not Kconfig reserved words. Since undefined
symbols evaluate to 'n', writing 'default Y' or 'default M' silently
produces 'n' instead of 'y'/'m'. 'default N' happens to produce the
right value but is still invalid syntax.

Add a warning for N/Y/M in Kconfig expressions found by following
the same preprocessing logic used by the Kconfig parser itself.

This new warning was inspired by work done for [1].

Link: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=216748 [1]
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-sonnet-4-6
Signed-off-by: Andrew Jones <andrew.jones@xxxxxxxxx>
Acked-by: Andy Shevchenko <andriy.shevchenko@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
---

v4:
- handle quoted N/M/Y [Julian]
- improved stripping of $(macro) expansions [Sashiko]

v3:
- More changes from another sashiko review which required the
Perl to get even uglier.
v2:
- Added Andy's tag
- Changes thanks to sashiko's review
- strip quoted strings before inline comments to avoid '#' inside a string
- use [^)]* instead of .* in macro strip regex to avoid greedy match
eating tokens between adjacent $(macro) expansions

scripts/checkpatch.pl | 16 ++++++++++++++++
1 file changed, 16 insertions(+)

diff --git a/scripts/checkpatch.pl b/scripts/checkpatch.pl
index 3727156e4cca..5ed74102ac23 100755
--- a/scripts/checkpatch.pl
+++ b/scripts/checkpatch.pl
@@ -3732,6 +3732,22 @@ sub process {
}
}

+# check for uppercase N/Y/M used as Kconfig tristate literals
+ if ($realfile =~ /Kconfig/ &&
+ $line =~ /^\+\s*(?:default|def_bool|def_tristate|select|imply|depends\s+on|visible\s+if|range|if|bool|tristate|int|hex|string|prompt)\s+(.+)$/) {
+ my $expr = $1;
+ $expr =~ s/"([NYM])"/$1/g; # unwrap quoted N/Y/M
+ $expr =~ s/'([NYM])'/$1/g;
+ $expr =~ s/"(?:[^"\\]|\\.)*"|'(?:[^'\\]|\\.)*'//g; # strip quoted strings
+ $expr =~ s/#.*//; # strip inline comments
+ $expr =~ s/\$\((?:[^()]*|\((?:[^()]*|\([^()]*\))*\))*\)//g; # strip $(macro) expansions
+ for my $tok (split /[^A-Za-z0-9_]+/, $expr) {
+ next unless ($tok eq 'Y' || $tok eq 'M' || $tok eq 'N');
+ WARN("KCONFIG_TRISTATE_UPPERCASE",
+ "'$tok' is probably not what you want here; Kconfig tristate literals are always lowercase ('n', 'y', 'm')\n" . $herecurr);
+ }
+ }
+
# check MAINTAINERS entries
if ($realfile =~ /^MAINTAINERS$/) {
# check MAINTAINERS entries for the right form
--
2.43.0