Re: [RFC PATCH] gpio: consumer: new virtual driver

[Linus Walleij]

On Wed, Aug 2, 2023 at 5:28 PM Bartosz Golaszewski <brgl@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

> From: Bartosz Golaszewski <bartosz.golaszewski@xxxxxxxxxx>
>
> The GPIO subsystem has a serious problem with undefined behavior and
> use-after-free bugs on hot-unplug of GPIO chips. This can be considered a
> corner-case by some as most GPIO controllers are enabled early in the
> boot process and live until the system goes down but most GPIO drivers
> do allow unbind over sysfs, many are loadable modules that can be (force)
> unloaded and there are also GPIO devices that can be dynamically detached,
> for instance CP2112 which is a USB GPIO expender.
>
> Bugs can be triggered both from user-space as well as by in-kernel users.
> We have the means of testing it from user-space via the character device
> but the issues manifest themselves differently in the kernel.
>
> This is a proposition of adding a new virtual driver - a configurable
> GPIO consumer that can be configured over configfs (similarly to
> gpio-sim).
>
> The configfs interface allows users to create dynamic GPIO lookup tables
> that are registered with the GPIO subsystem. Every config group
> represents a consumer device. Every sub-group represents a single GPIO
> lookup. The device can work in three modes: just keeping the line
> active, toggling it every second or requesting its interrupt and
> reporting edges. Every lookup allows to specify the key, offset and
> flags as per the lookup struct defined in linux/gpio/machine.h.
>
> The module together with gpio-sim allows to easily trigger kernel
> hot-unplug errors. A simple use-case is to create a simulated chip,
> setup the consumer to lookup one of its lines in 'monitor' mode, unbind
> the simulator, unbind the consumer and observe the fireworks in dmesg.
>
> This driver is aimed as a helper in tackling the hot-unplug problem in
> GPIO as well as basis for future regression testing once the fixes are
> upstream.
>
> Signed-off-by: Bartosz Golaszewski <bartosz.golaszewski@xxxxxxxxxx>

Anyone can easily see how this will benefit testing, so:
Acked-by: Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@xxxxxxxxxx>

> +config GPIO_CONSUMER
> +       tristate "GPIO Consumer Testing Module"
> +       select CONFIGFS_FS
> +       help
> +         This enables the configurable, configfs-based virtual GPIO consumer
> +         testing driver.

Since this is only for debugging, should it depend on DEBUG?

Yours,
Linus Walleij