The problem I am facing is that I am using lm75 for temperature monitoring and lm80 for temperature and fan tacho monitoring.
This is an embedded (powerpc) system using a 2.6.38 kernel, and accessing the sensors through the sysfs interface.
The customer wants to be able to detect if someone accidently disconnects the fan (or the monitoring chip dies).
I know i2c is not hot pluggable, but would have expected to be able to detect this error condition
However, from peeking at the sources, it seems I am not.
lm75.c says (function lm75_update_device)
for (i = 0; i < ARRAY_SIZE(data->temp); i++) {
int status;
status = lm75_read_value(client, LM75_REG_TEMP[i]);
if (status < 0)
dev_dbg(&client->dev, "reg %d, err %d\n",
LM75_REG_TEMP[i], status);
else
data->temp[i] = status;
}
data->last_updated = jiffies;
data->valid = 1;
So there is an error message if dbg is on, but a user will still get the old data as temp[i] is not updated.
Wouldn't it be nice to e.g. add a (bool) attribute data-valid or or so and drop that to 0 on a read fail (or maybe 3 subsequent read fails)?
Or is there a better way do detect such a problem in user space (e.g. by putting an "error" value in the var)
I've also peeked at lm80.c
Here the situation seems to be a little bit worse.
E.g. I see:
static int lm80_read_value(struct i2c_client *client, u8 reg)
{
return i2c_smbus_read_byte_data(client, reg);
}
...
data->temp =
(lm80_read_value(client, LM80_REG_TEMP) << 8) |
(lm80_read_value(client, LM80_REG_RES) & 0xf0);
but i2c_smbus_read_byte_data may return a negative value upon error.
To me it seems this is not going to return a sensible value in case the read fails (and also not e.g. something like -1)
Is this desired? Should this be fixed? Or is there a better way to do so?
If needed, I can have a stab at the code to fix it, but in that case I would appreciate some guidance in the direction of the preferred solution (so my work is not rejected because it was felt a faulty solution).
Best regards & seasons greetings,
Frans
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