Re: [PATCH] media: uvcvideo: Filter hw errors while enumerating controls

[Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com>]

On Thu, Dec 19, 2024 at 09:18:30AM +0100, Ricardo Ribalda wrote:
> On Thu, 19 Dec 2024 at 00:28, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 18, 2024 at 03:38:34PM +0100, Ricardo Ribalda wrote:
> > > On Fri, 13 Dec 2024 at 12:21, Ricardo Ribalda wrote:
> > > >
> > > > To implement VIDIOC_QUERYCTRL, we need to read from the hardware all the
> > > > values that were not cached previously. If that read fails, we used to
> > > > report back the error to the user.
> > > >
> > > > Unfortunately this does not play nice with userspace. When they are
> > > > enumerating the contols, the only expect an error when there are no
> > > > "next" control.
> > > >
> > > > This is probably a corner case, and could be handled in userspace, but
> > > > both v4l2-ctl and yavta fail to enumerate all the controls if we return
> > > > then -EIO during VIDIOC_QUERYCTRL. I suspect that there are tons of
> > > > userspace apps handling this wrongly as well.
> > >
> > > Actually it CANNOT be handled in userspace.
> > >
> > > If we return anything different than 0, the structure is not copied to
> > > userspace:
> >
> > That could be fixed, we do copy data back to userspace in case of
> > failure for some ioctls. I don't think that would be needed though, I
> > believe we can either mark controls as broken in the uvcvideo driver
> > through quirks, or in a dynamic fashion.
> 
> I'd rather not introduce more differences between uvc and the rest of
> the drivers.
> 
> the ctrl framework only seems to return -EINVAL or 0.

True, but that's likely because there's no driver today other than
uvcvideo that needs to interogate the hardware in a way that can fail to
implement QUERYCTRL. I wish we didn't have to, but UVC is special from
that point of view.

Anyway, as mentioned in a separate answer in this mail thread, we may
not need this if we hide the problematic controls from applications.

> > > https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/media/v4l2-core/v4l2-ioctl.c#n2929
> > > https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/media/v4l2-core/v4l2-ioctl.c#n3490

-- 
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart