umockdev: record and mock hardware for debugging and testing

What is this?

umockdev is a set of tools and a library to mock hardware devices for programs that handle Linux hardware devices. It also provides tools to record the properties and behaviour of particular devices, and to run a program or test suite under a test bed with the previously recorded devices loaded.

This allows developers of software like gphoto or libmtp to receive these records in bug reports and recreate the problem on their system without having access to the affected hardware, as well as writing regression tests for those that do not need any particular privileges and thus are capable of running in standard make check.

After working on it for several weeks and lots of rumbling on G+, it’s now useful and documented enough for the first release 0.1!

Component overview

umockdev consists of the following parts:

The umockdev-record program generates text dumps (conventionally called *.umockdev) of some specified, or all of the system’s devices and their sysfs attributes and udev properties. It can also record ioctls that a particular program sends and receives to/from a device, and store them into a text file (conventionally called *.ioctl).
The libumockdev library provides the UMockdevTestbed GObject class which builds sysfs and /dev testbeds, provides API to generate devices, attributes, properties, and uevents on the fly, and can load *.umockdev and *.ioctl records into them. It provides VAPI and GI bindings, so you can use it from C, Vala, and any programming language that supports introspection. This is the API that you should use for writing regression tests. You can find the API documentation in docs/reference in the source directory.
The libumockdev-preload library intercepts access to /sys, /dev/, the kernel’s netlink socket (for uevents) and ioctl() and re-routes them into the sandbox built by libumockdev. You don’t interface with this library directly, instead you need to run your test suite or other program that uses libumockdev through the umockdev-wrapper program.
The umockdev-run program builds a sandbox using libumockdev, can load *.umockdev and *.ioctl files into it, and run a program in that sandbox. I. e. it is a CLI interface to libumockdev, which is useful in the “debug a failure with a particular device” use case if you get the text dumps from a bug report. This automatically takes care of using the preload library, i. e. you don’t need umockdev-wrapper with this. You cannot use this program if you need to simulate uevents or change attributes/properties on the fly; for those you need to use libumockdev directly.

Example: Record and replay PtP/MTP USB devices

So how do you use umockdev? For the “debug a problem” use case you usually don’t want to write a program that uses libumockdev, but just use the command line tools. Let’s capture some runs from libmtp tools, and replay them in a mock environment:

Connect your digital camera, mobile phone, or other device which supports PtP or MTP, and locate it in lsusb. For example
```
Bus 001 Device 012: ID 0fce:0166 Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro
```
Dump the sysfs device and udev properties:
```
$ umockdev-record /dev/bus/usb/001/012 > mobile.umockdev
```
- Now record the dynamic behaviour (i. e. usbfs ioctls) of various operations. You can store multiple different operations in the same file, which will share the common communication between them. For example:
```
$ umockdev-record –ioctl mobile.ioctl /dev/bus/usb/001/012 mtp-detect
$ umockdev-record –ioctl mobile.ioctl /dev/bus/usb/001/012 mtp-emptyfolders
```
- Now you can disconnect your device, and run the same operations in a mocked testbed. Please note that /dev/bus/usb/001/012 merely echoes what is in mobile.umockdev and it is independent of what is actually in the real /dev directory. You can rename that device in the generated *.umockdev files and on the command line.
```
$ umockdev-run –load mobile.umockdev –ioctl /dev/bus/usb/001/012=mobile.ioctl mtp-detect
$ umockdev-run –load mobile.umockdev –ioctl /dev/bus/usb/001/012=mobile.ioctl mtp-emptyfolders
```

Example: using the library to fake a battery

If you want to write regression tests, it’s usually more flexible to use the library instead of calling everything through umockdev-run. As a simple example, let’s pretend we want to write tests for upower.

Batteries, and power supplies in general, are simple devices in the sense that userspace programs such as upower only communicate with them through sysfs and uevents. No /dev nor ioctls are necessary. docs/examples/ has two example programs how to use libumockdev to create a fake battery device, change it to low charge, sending an uevent, and running upower on a local test system D-BUS in the testbed, with watching what happens with upower --monitor-detail. battery.c shows how to do that with plain GObject in C, battery.py is the equivalent program in Python that uses the GI binding. You can just run the latter like this:

umockdev-wrapper python3 docs/examples/battery.py

and you will see that upowerd (which runs on a temporary local system D-BUS in the test bed) will report a single battery with 75% charge, which gets down to 2.5% a second later.

The gist of it is that you create a test bed with

UMockdevTestbed *testbed = umockdev_testbed_new ();

and add a device with certain sysfs attributes and udev properties with

gchar *sys_bat = umockdev_testbed_add_device (
        testbed, "power_supply", "fakeBAT0", NULL,
        /* attributes */
        "type", "Battery",
        "present", "1",
        "status", "Discharging",
        "energy_full", "60000000",
        "energy_full_design", "80000000",
        "energy_now", "48000000",
        "voltage_now", "12000000",
        NULL,
        /* properties */
        "POWER_SUPPLY_ONLINE", "1",
        NULL);

You can then e. g. change an attribute and synthesize a “change” uevent with

umockdev_testbed_set_attribute (testbed, sys_bat, "energy_now", "1500000");
umockdev_testbed_uevent (testbed, sys_bat, "change");

With Python or other introspected languages, or in Vala it works the same way, except that it looks a bit leaner due to “proper” object semantics.

Packages

I have a packaging branch for Ubuntu and a recipe to do daily builds with the latest upstream code into my daily builds PPA (for 12.10 and raring). I will soon upload it to Raring proper, too.

What’s next?

The current set of features should already get you quite far for a range of devices. I’d love to get feedback from you if you use this for anything useful, in particular how to improve the API, the command line tools, or the text dump format. I’m not really happy with the split between umockdev (sys/dev) and ioctl files and the relatively complicated CLI syntax of umockdev-record, so any suggestion is welcome.

One use case that I have for myself is to extend the coverage of ioctls for input devices such as touch screens and wacom tablets, so that we can write some tests for gnome-settings-daemon plugins.

I also want to find a way to pass ioctls back to the test suite/calling program instead of having to handle them all in the preload library, which would make it a lot more flexible. However, due to the nature of the ioctl ABI this is not easy.

Where to go to

The code is hosted on github in the umockdev project; this started out as a systemd branch to add this functionality to libudev, but after a discussion with Kay we decided to keep it separate. But I kept it in git anyway, given how popular it is today. For the bzr lovers, Launchpad has an import at lp:umockdev.

Release tarballs will be on Launchpad as well. Please file bugs and enhancement requests in the git hub tracker.

Finally, if you have questions or want to discuss something, you can always find me on IRC (pitti on Freenode or GNOME).

Thanks for your attention and happy testing!

Martin Pitt