attribute documentation
abi2doc
is a helper tool for generating and formatting sysfs attribute
documentation which is location under Documentation/ABI
\ in the kernel
source code.
From a rough estimate
_, there are around 2000 attributes that are undocumented
in the kernel.
.. image:: https://plot.ly/~aishpant/1.png?share_key=8mG4JmyySLLYjbjTg7Uy62
:target: https://plot.ly/~aishpant/1/?share_key=8mG4JmyySLLYjbjTg7Uy62
:align: center
:alt: sysfs line plot
:width: 600px
The ABI documentation format looks like the following:
| What: (the full sysfs path of the attribute)
| Date: (date of creation)
| KernelVersion: (kernel version it first showed up in)
| Contact: (primary contact)
| Description: (long description on usage)
abi2doc
can fill in the 'Date
' and the 'KernelVersion
' fields with high
accuracy. The 'Contact
' details is prompted for once, and the others 'What
'
and 'Description
' are prompted on every attribute.
It also tries to collect description from various sources-
-
From the commit message that introduced the attribute
-
From comments around the attribute show/store functions or the attribute
declaring macro.
-
From the structure fields that map to the attribute.
For eg. consider the attribute declaring macro PORT_RO(dest_id)
and its
show function port_destid_show(...)
.
.. code:: c
static ssize_t
port_destid_show(struct device *dev, struct device_attribute *attr,
char *buf)
{
struct rio_mport *mport = to_rio_mport(dev);
if (mport)
return sprintf(buf, "0x%04x\n", mport->host_deviceid);
else
return -ENODEV;
}
The show functions typically contain a conversion to a driver private struct
and then one or many fields from it are put in the buffer.
In the example above, the driver private structure is a struct of type
rio_mport
and the attribute port_id
maps to the field host_deviceid
in
the structure.
.. code:: c
struct rio_mport {
...
int host_deviceid; /* Host device ID */
struct rio_ops *ops; /* low-level architecture-dependent routines */
unsigned char id; /* port ID, unique among all ports */
...
};
There's a comment against host_deviceid
here and this can be extracted.
All sysfs attribute declaring macros are located in abi2doc/macros.txt
. Each
row of macros.txt
contains an attribute declaring macro space separated by the
location of the attribute name in the macro - DEVICE_ATTR 0
. This list is not
complete. Please send a pull request if you find any that are not in the list.
Usage
Prerequisites:
- Coccinelle -
install instructions
_
spatch will need to be compiled with option ./configure --with-python=python3
- Python 3
- Linux Kernel source code
abi2doc
is available on PYPI
_. Install with pip3
:
pip3 install abi2doc
The library is currently tested against Python versions 3.4+
.
.. code:: bash
usage: abi2doc [-h] -f SOURCE_FILE -o OUTPUT_FILE
Helper for documenting Linux Kernel sysfs attributes
required arguments:
-f SOURCE_FILE linux source file to document
-o OUTPUT_FILE location of the generated sysfs ABI documentation
optional arguments:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
Example usage:
.. code:: bash
abi2doc -f drivers/video/backlight/lp855x_bl.c -o sysfs_doc.txt
The script will fill in the 'Date
' and the 'KernelVersion
' fields for found
attributes. The 'Contact
' details is prompted for once, and the others 'What'
and 'Description
' are prompted on every attribute. The entered description
will be followed by hints, as shown in a generated file below.
::
What: /sys/class/backlight/<backlight>/bled_mode
Date: Oct, 2012
KernelVersion: 3.7
Contact: dri-devel@lists.freedesktop.org
Description:
(WO) Write to the backlight mapping mode. The backlight current
can be mapped for either exponential (value "0") or linear
mapping modes (default).
--------------------------------
%%%%% Hints below %%%%%
bled_mode DEVICE_ATTR drivers/video/backlight/lm3639_bl.c 220
--------------------------------
%%%%% store fn comments %%%%%
/* backlight mapping mode */
--------------------------------
%%%%% commit message %%%%%
commit 0f59858d511960caefb42c4535dc73c2c5f3136c
Author: G.Shark Jeong <gshark.jeong@gmail.com>
Date: Thu Oct 4 17:12:55 2012 -0700
backlight: add new lm3639 backlight driver
This driver is a general version for LM3639 backlgiht + flash driver chip
of TI.
LM3639:
The LM3639 is a single chip LCD Display Backlight driver + white LED
Camera driver. Programming is done over an I2C compatible interface.
www.ti.com
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: code layout tweaks]
Signed-off-by: G.Shark Jeong <gshark.jeong@gmail.com>
Cc: Richard Purdie <rpurdie@rpsys.net>
Cc: Daniel Jeong <daniel.jeong@ti.com>
Cc: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@xenotime.net>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Expected time for the scripts to run =
(num of attrs x avg 4 min per attr)/num of cores
.
Contributions
Contributions are welcome, whether it is in the form of code or documentation.
Please refer to the issues
_ tab for places that need help.
.. _install instructions: https://github.com/coccinelle/coccinelle/
.. _PYPI: https://pypi.org/project/abi2doc/
.. _Coccinelle: http://coccinelle.lip6.fr/
.. _rough estimate: https://github.com/aishpant/documentation-scripts/blob/master/result/output.csv
.. _issues: https://github.com/aishpant/attribute-documentation/issues