How the rt2x00 driver (kernel version 2.6.24) handles scan request - linux

I work with raling rt73 usb device on Ubuntu 8.04 (kernel version 2.6.24) on lpia (Intel Atom) platform. The device is handled by rt2x00 drivers that are part of the kernel. The scan routines are performed incorrect (eg. wrong signal quality and redundant networks are detected). I want to fix these issues, but I cannot find the place in the driver code where those mentioned values are calculated. Unfortunately neither the driver is exhaustively documented, nor the website of the project provided me with useful information.
I wanted to track how the ioctl commands are executed (e.g. SIOCSIWSCAN or SIOCGIWSCAN commands) but they are not mentioned in the code (grep SIOCSIWSCAN * returns nothing). Also the struct, where the scan results are stored (struct iwreq) does not exist in the code.
I am fresh to drivers so maybe I am approaching the problem in wrong way. Can you push me in right direction?

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Linux kernel: Find all drivers reachable via syscalls

I am comparing a mainline Linux kernel source with a modified copy of the same source that has many drivers added. A little background: That modified source is an Android kernel source, it contains many drivers added by the vendor, SoC manufacturer, Google etc.
I am trying to identify all drivers added in the modified source that are reachable from userspace via any syscalls. I'm looking for some systematic or ideally automatic way to find all these to avoid the manual work.
For example, char device drivers are of interest, since I could perform some openat, read, write, ioctl and close syscalls on them if there is a corresponding device file. To find new character device drivers, I could first find all new files in the source tree and then grep them for struct file_operations. But besides char drivers, what else is there that I need to look for?
I know that the syscalls mentioned above do some kind of "forwarding" to the respective device driver associated with the file. But are there other syscalls that do this kind of forwarding? I think I would have to focus on all these syscalls, right?
Is there something I can grep for in source files that indicates that syscalls can lead there? How should I go about this to find all these drivers?
Update (narrowing down):
I am targeting specific devices (e.g. Huawei P20 Lite), so I know relevant architecture and hardware. But for the sake of this question, we can just assume that hardware for whatever driver is present. It doesn't really matter in my case if I invoked a driver and it reported back that no corresponding hardware is present, as long as I can invoke the driver.
I only look for the drivers directly reachable via syscalls. By directly reachable I mean drivers designed to have some syscall interface with userspace. Yes, syscalls not aimed at a certain driver may still indirectly trigger code in that driver, but these indirect effects can be neglected.
Maybe some background on my objective clarifies: I want to fuzz-test the found drivers using Syzkaller. For this, I would create descriptions of the syscalls usable to fuzz each driver that Syzkaller parses.
I'm pretty sure there is no way to do this programmatically. Any attempt to do so would hit up against a couple of problems:
The drivers that are called in a given case depend on the hardware. For example, on my laptop, the iwlwifi driver will be reachable via network syscalls, but on a server that driver won't be used.
Virtually any code loaded into the kernel is reachable from some syscall if the hardware is present. Drivers interact with hardware, which in turn either interacts with users, external devices, or networks, and all of these operations are reachable by syscalls. People don't write drivers that don't do anything.
Even drivers that aren't directly reachable by a system call can affect execution. For example, a driver for a true RNG would be able to affect execution by changing the behavior of the system PRNG, even if it weren't accessible by /dev/hwrng.
So for a generic kernel that can run on any hardware of a given architecture, it's going to be pretty hard to exclude any driver from consideration. If your hope is to trace the execution of the code by some programmatic means without actually executing it, then you're going to need to solve the halting problem.
Sorry for the bad news.

Linux: access i2c device within board_init function

(iMX6 SOC running Linux 3.0)
I need to run a few I2C transactions in my board_init function. I tried calling i2c_get_adapter, then i2c_transfer, those being available in kernel mode, but i2c_get_adapter returns NULL. It's already called imx6q_add_imx_i2c, which is a wrapper around platform_device_register_full, but that isn't enough.
I can manipulate GPIO in board_init by calling gpio_request to obtain access, and gpio_free at the end. Is there something analogous to those functions for i2c?
--- added details ---
I've got a LAN9500A USB 100Base-T Ethernet MAC connected to a LAN9303 3-port switch with a virtual PHY. The MAC has a GPIO reset line that has to be turned off before it will spring to life and enumerate on the USB. That's done in board_init because it's completely nonstandard, so we don't want to patch the stock driver to manipulate some GPIO that's not part of the device.
The problem I'm having is that even though the MAC is permanently attached to the VPHY, it's not noticing it's connected, and an "ip link show eth1" command shows NO-CARRIER. I found I can kickstart it by unmasking the VPHY's Device Ready interrupt via I2C, but I also have to mask it immediately, or I get infinite interrupts. That's not the right solution, but Microchip has been no help in showing me a better way. But we don't want to patch the MAC driver with code to fiddle with the PHY.
There is no PHY driver for this part, and the MII interface to the VPHY doesn't include any interrupt-related registers, so it must be done through I2C. Writing a PHY driver just to flip a bit on and off once seems a lot of trouble, especially for a newbie like me who's never written a driver before.
I can do it in Python in a startup script, but that, too, seems like a heavyweight solution to a lightweight problem.
That's a wrong approach. Board file supposed to register device drivers and pass important information to them, rather than act as a device driver itself. I'm not sure if what you're trying to do is even possible.
If you really need to extract something from your I2C device on a very early stage - do that in the bootloader and pass the data to kernel via cmdline (U-boot, by the way, has I2C support for a quite some time). Then later, kernel might do appropriate actions depending on what you have passed to it.

How can I get edge events via GPIO on Linux without a busy-loop?

I'm working an a system with embedded Linux (Kernel 2.6.31).
It is a AT91SAM9G20 chip inside, and some of the Pins are forwarded to the outside.
Now I want to use them as GPIO Inputs.
I read the gpio.txt documentation about using the GPIOs via filesystem, and that works very well 'til here. I connected some switches to the gpio-pins and I can see the result in /sys/class/gpio/gpioX/value. But now I'd like to react on a change without busy-waiting in a loop. (i.e echo "Switch1 was pressed").
I guess I need interrupts here, but I couldn't find out how to use them without writing my own kernel driver. I'm relatively new to Linux and C (I normally program in Java), so I'd like to handle the Interrupts via sysfs too. But my problem is, that there is no "edge"-file in my GPIO directory (I guess because this is only since Kernel version 2.6.33+). Is that right? Instead of "edge" I've got a uevent file in there, which is not described in gpio.txt.
In the gpio.txt documentation there was a Standard Kernel Driver mentioned: "gpio_keys". Is it possible to use this for my problem?
I guess it would be better to work with this driver than allowing a userspace program to manipulate kernel tasks.
I found a lot of codesnippets for writing my own driver, but I wasn't even able to find out which of the 600 gpio.h files to include, and how to refer to the library (cross compiler couldn't find the gpio.h file).
Sorry for newbie questions, I hope you could give me some advices.
Thanks in advance
See this for an example on how to do that. Basically, the thing you're missing is the usage of the select or poll system calls.

Linux RFID reader HID Device not matching driver

I got a RFID reader (GigaTek PCR330A-00) that is meant to be recognized under linux/windows as a (Human Interface Device) keyboard/USB.
I hate to say this but it is working as a charm under Win7 but not "really" under Linux.
Under Debian-like distros (x/k/Ubuntu, Debian,..), or Gentoo, or... I just can't have the device working at all: the device scan well (it has its USB 5V, so it is happy/beeping/blinking) something happened in the dmesg, but no immediate screen display of the RFID Tag code as expected (and seen under win7)
Support is claiming it is ok under RHEL or SLED "enterprises" distros... and I must admit I saw it working under a RHEL4... I tried stealing the driver but did not succeed having my reader working...
My question is thus double:
1./ How can I hack the kernel to add support to my device (simply register PID/VID?) ?
2./ What is different at all in a "enterprise" proprietary distro? how can I re-use it?
Thank you for any hint/help.
Cheers,
If you have the source code of the driver you can compile it against the current Kernel your system uses, since the Kernel only allows drivers for its current version. Then you can try to load it as a Kernel module, notice that by doing this, you do not hack the Kernel you just need your current system's Kernel header to compile the driver against it.
You may want to check this http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/drivers_linux in order to grasp the basics.
Hope this helps.

ARM linux and cross toolchain issue

I have a problem probably with my arm toolchain but maybe there's something other that I do wrong. I have Chinese made dev board qq2440 using Samsung s3c2440 ARM9 uC. I'm using Ubuntu x86 with native gcc(4.3.3) and cross-compile version arm-unknown-linux-uclibc-gcc (crosstool-NG-1.3.2) 4.3.2
I followed tutorials from http://blog.leshak.ru/english/pages/how-to-install-u-boot-linux-2629-rootfsjffs2-busybox-1132-into-nand-qq2440/
and used Leshak's kernel patches for that board. Problem is that his binaries work perfectly and mine don't...
I communicate with my board over RS232 (serial port) and I have serial terminal configured on target Linux. I use Leshak's uboot image. To configure my kernel I use following command line:
qq2440> setenv bootargs 'noinitrd root=/dev/mtdblock2 rootfstype=jffs2 rw console=ttySAC0,115200'
For target I use vanilla Linux sources version 2.6.29, with patches created by Leshak. I don't honestly believe that this will ever be supported officially by Linux as it's not mainstream product.
My kernel image starts booting up, but it probably changes bandwidth (or CPU frequency) to some non standard value (tried all standard ones already). Instead of dots indicating loading kernel into memory I've got only trash instead. Unfortunately it doesn't probably finish the boot process as the network interface nor file system don't come up. So I figured out that it panics somewhere in the middle.
Any ideas what should I do next?
Thanks & regards,
Chris
There are a lot of different things that could be going on here.
It sounds like you are talking about a serial port, and that it appears to be giving garbage once control is passed to the kernel from uboot. Am I understanding that correctly?
Look into specifying the baud rate, parity, etc. for the serial console on the kernel commandline.
Oh, and IIRC, there was some 'early_printk' thing in the ARM Linux tree that might help you debug serial console problems. (But I'll warn you -- it's been a couple years since I dealt with that so my memory is fuzzy.)
Double-check that the memory address layout (the locations of all the various devices) matches what your board has. (I think this is probably not the issue, but wanted to mention it for completeness.)
You say that you have a binary kernel that works correctly; compare the kernel config of that kernel to the config you are using for building your kernel. Investigate every difference, particularly any specific to ARM.
You may want to double-check the endianness of your toolchain vs what your board is expecting. Some of the ARM / XScale processors can be configured to big-endian or little-endian in software, so it might be worth double-checking.
Just enable the debug build of the kernel[while building the uImage] so that you get a more clearer picture of the scenario [Just would make your boot up somewhat slow since all the printk's would be enabled].
Can you check whether you are passing the correct parameters to the UART ie. Serial Port Name, it's baud rate etc This would be provided by the board manufacturer-Samsung
WRT the network instead of DHCP can you just assign a static ip address to your system as it might be possible that the DHCP process is still not ON.
Also a better option would be to use NFS but yeah, it depends on your choice and the purpose of your application. To use NFS, your network should be UP & running and your filesystem should be shared.
As retracile has already pointed out "Endianness" could be a point to look into !!!
You can refer this link which might help you out since it is specific to S3C2440
Hope this helps.
-hjsblogger
I had a similar problem at one point when I omitted --send-cmd from picocom. this is the command I issue to picocom for serial uBoot comms with the mini2440.
picocom -b 115200 /dev/ttyS0 --send-cmd "sx -vv"

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