Kernel Device Driver Testing

Greg Kroah-Hartman gregkh at linuxfoundation.org
Wed Nov 8 18:11:04 UTC 2017


On Wed, Nov 08, 2017 at 11:57:09AM -0500, tedheadster wrote:
> Greg,
>   I had an idea about device drivers and self-tests. Create a compiler
> tag called __selftest which would function similar to __init. A device
> driver author could write directly into their kernel module self-test
> functions identified with this tag.
> 
> Using the tag, the person compiling the kernel could:
> 
> 1) Completely remove the code/data at compile-time.
> 2) Have the code run once at boot and then free the memory after a single use.
> 3) Leave the code in place and expose it to userland via the debugfs
> filesystem. Users could run the tests at their pleasure.
> 
> It would be an opt-in system, so existing drivers could have the code
> added at your leisure.
> 
> What are your thoughts on this idea?

Patches are always welcome, kernel development is not done by design
documents :)

Best of luck!

greg k-h


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