| Linux I2C fault injection |
| ========================= |
| |
| The GPIO based I2C bus master driver can be configured to provide fault |
| injection capabilities. It is then meant to be connected to another I2C bus |
| which is driven by the I2C bus master driver under test. The GPIO fault |
| injection driver can create special states on the bus which the other I2C bus |
| master driver should handle gracefully. |
| |
| Once the Kconfig option I2C_GPIO_FAULT_INJECTOR is enabled, there will be an |
| 'i2c-fault-injector' subdirectory in the Kernel debugfs filesystem, usually |
| mounted at /sys/kernel/debug. There will be a separate subdirectory per GPIO |
| driven I2C bus. Each subdirectory will contain files to trigger the fault |
| injection. They will be described now along with their intended use-cases. |
| |
| "scl" |
| ----- |
| |
| By reading this file, you get the current state of SCL. By writing, you can |
| change its state to either force it low or to release it again. So, by using |
| "echo 0 > scl" you force SCL low and thus, no communication will be possible |
| because the bus master under test will not be able to clock. It should detect |
| the condition of SCL being unresponsive and report an error to the upper |
| layers. |
| |
| "sda" |
| ----- |
| |
| By reading this file, you get the current state of SDA. By writing, you can |
| change its state to either force it low or to release it again. So, by using |
| "echo 0 > sda" you force SDA low and thus, data cannot be transmitted. The bus |
| master under test should detect this condition and trigger a bus recovery (see |
| I2C specification version 4, section 3.1.16) using the helpers of the Linux I2C |
| core (see 'struct bus_recovery_info'). However, the bus recovery will not |
| succeed because SDA is still pinned low until you manually release it again |
| with "echo 1 > sda". A test with an automatic release can be done with the |
| 'incomplete_transfer' file. |
| |
| "incomplete_transfer" |
| --------------------- |
| |
| This file is write only and you need to write the address of an existing I2C |
| client device to it. Then, a transfer to this device will be started, but it |
| will stop at the ACK phase after the address of the client has been |
| transmitted. Because the device will ACK its presence, this results in SDA |
| being pulled low by the device while SCL is high. So, similar to the "sda" file |
| above, the bus master under test should detect this condition and try a bus |
| recovery. This time, however, it should succeed and the device should release |
| SDA after toggling SCL. Please note: there are I2C client devices which detect |
| a stuck SDA on their side and release it on their own after a few milliseconds. |
| Also, there are external devices deglitching and monitoring the I2C bus. They |
| can also detect a stuck SDA and will init a bus recovery on their own. If you |
| want to implement bus recovery in a bus master driver, make sure you checked |
| your hardware setup carefully before. |