[PATCH v4 19/31] Documentation: kconfig: document a new Kconfig macro language

Masahiro Yamada
2018-05-17T06:19:16Z

Add a document for the macro language introduced to Kconfig.

The motivation of this work is to move the compiler option tests to
Kconfig from Makefile. A number of kernel features require the
compiler support. Enabling such features blindly in Kconfig ends up
with a lot of nasty build-time testing in Makefiles. If a chosen
feature turns out unsupported by the compiler, what the build system
can do is either to disable it (silently!) or to forcibly break the
build, despite Kconfig has let the user to enable it. By moving the
compiler capability tests to Kconfig, features unsupported by the
compiler will be hidden automatically.

This change was strongly prompted by Linus Torvalds. You can find
his suggestions [1] [2] in ML. The original idea was to add a new
attribute with 'option shell=...', but I found more generalized text
expansion would make Kconfig more powerful and lovely. The basic
ideas are from Make, but there are some differences.

[1]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/12/9/577
[2]: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/2/7/527

Signed-off-by: Masahiro Yamada <yamada.masahiro@socionext.com>
---

Changes in v4:
- Update according to the syntax change

Changes in v3:
- Newly added

Changes in v2: None

Documentation/kbuild/kconfig-macro-language.txt | 252 ++++++++++++++++++++++++
MAINTAINERS | 2 +-
2 files changed, 253 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
create mode 100644 Documentation/kbuild/kconfig-macro-language.txt

diff --git a/Documentation/kbuild/kconfig-macro-language.txt b/Documentation/kbuild/kconfig-macro-language.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..a8dc792
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/kbuild/kconfig-macro-language.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,252 @@
+Concept
+-------
+
+The basic idea was inspired by Make. When we look at Make, we notice sort of
+two languages in one. One language describes dependency graphs consisting of
+targets and prerequisites. The other is a macro language for performing textual
+substitution.
+
+There is clear distinction between the two language stages. For example, you
+can write a makefile like follows:
+
+ APP := foo
+ SRC := foo.c
+ CC := gcc
+
+ $(APP): $(SRC)
+ $(CC) -o $(APP) $(SRC)
+
+The macro language replaces the variable references with their expanded form,
+and handles as if the source file were input like follows:
+
+ foo: foo.c
+ gcc -o foo foo.c
+
+Then, Make analyzes the dependency graph and determines the targets to be
+updated.
+
+The idea is quite similar in Kconfig - it is possible to describe a Kconfig
+file like this:
+
+ CC := gcc
+
+ config CC_HAS_FOO
+ def_bool $(shell, $(srctree)/scripts/gcc-check-foo.sh $(CC))
+
+The macro language in Kconfig processes the source file into the following
+intermediate:
+
+ config CC_HAS_FOO
+ def_bool y
+
+Then, Kconfig moves onto the evaluation stage to resolve inter-symbol
+dependency as explained in kconfig-language.txt.
+
+
+Variables
+---------
+
+Like in Make, a variable in Kconfig works as a macro variable. A macro
+variable is expanded "in place" to yield a text string that may then be
+expanded further. To get the value of a variable, enclose the variable name in
+$( ). The parentheses are required even for single-letter variable names; $X is
+a syntax error. The curly brace form as in ${CC} is not supported either.
+
+There are two types of variables: simply expanded variables and recursively
+expanded variables.
+
+A simply expanded variable is defined using the := assignment operator. Its
+righthand side is expanded immediately upon reading the line from the Kconfig
+file.
+
+A recursively expanded variable is defined using the = assignment operator.
+Its righthand side is simply stored as the value of the variable without
+expanding it in any way. Instead, the expansion is performed when the variable
+is used.
+
+There is another type of assignment operator; += is used to append text to a
+variable. The righthand side of += is expanded immediately if the lefthand
+side was originally defined as a simple variable. Otherwise, its evaluation is
+deferred.
+
+The variable reference can take parameters, in the following form:
+
+ $(name,arg1,arg2,arg3)
+
+You can consider the parameterized reference as a function. (more precisely,
+"user-defined function" in the contrast to "built-in function" listed below).
+
+Useful functions must be expanded when they are used since the same function is
+expanded differently if different parameters are passed. Hence, a user-defined
+function is defined using the = assignment operator. The parameters are
+referenced within the body definition with $(1), $(2), etc.
+
+In fact, recursively expanded variables and user-defined functions are the same
+internally. (In other words, "variable" is "function with zero argument".)
+When we say "variable" in a broad sense, it includes "user-defined function".
+
+
+Built-in functions
+------------------
+
+Like Make, Kconfig provides several built-in functions. Every function takes a
+particular number of arguments.
+
+In Make, every built-in function takes at least one argument. Kconfig allows
+zero argument for built-in functions, such as $(fileno), $(lineno). You could
+consider those as "built-in variable", but it is just a matter of how we call
+it after all. Let's say "built-in function" here to refer to natively supported
+functionality.
+
+Kconfig currently supports the following built-in functions.
+
+ - $(shell,command)
+
+ The "shell" function accepts a single argument that is expanded and passed
+ to a subshell for execution. The standard output of the command is then read
+ and returned as the value of the function. Every newline in the output is
+ replaced with a space. Any trailing newlines are deleted. The standard error
+ is not returned, nor is any program exit status.
+
+ - $(info,text)
+
+ The "info" function takes a single argument and prints it to stdout.
+ It evaluates to an empty string.
+
+ - $(warning,text)
+
+ The "warning" function is similar to "info" except that it sends its argument
+ to stderr and prefixes the output with the name of the current Kconfig file
+ and the current line number.
+
+ - $(error,text)
+
+ The "error" function is similar to "warning", but it terminates the parsing
+ immediately.
+
+ - $(if,condition,then-part[,else-part])
+
+ The "if" function takes two or three arguments ('else-part' is optional).
+ Depending on the value of the condition part, the argument to be expanded
+ is selected. The condition is true if its expansion contains any characters
+ except whitespaces. In this case, the then-part is expanded. Otherwise, the
+ else-part is expanded.
+
+ Note:
+ In Make, the condition is true if it contains any characters including
+ whitespaces, which is why $(strip ...) is sometimes necessary in the
+ condition part. Kconfig changed the behavior to make it handier.
+
+ - $(filename)
+
+ The 'filename' takes no argument, and $(filename) is expanded to a file name
+ being parsed.
+
+ - $(lineno)
+
+ The 'lineno' takes no argument, and $(lineno) is expanded to a line number
+ being parsed.
+
+
+Difference of function call syntax
+----------------------------------
+
+Kconfig adopts Make-like macro language, but the function call syntax is
+slightly different.
+
+A function call in Make looks like follows:
+
+ $(func-name arg1,arg2,arg3)
+
+The function name and the first argument are separated by at least one
+whitespace. Then, leading whitespaces are trimmed from the first argument,
+but whitespaces in the other arguments are kept. You need to use a kind of
+trick to start the first parameter with spaces. For example, if you want
+to make "info" function print " hello", you can write like follows:
+
+ $(info $(space)$(space)hello)
+
+Kconfig uses only commas for delimiters, and keeps all whitespaces in the
+function call. Some people prefer putting a space after each comma delimiter:
+
+ $(func-name, arg1, arg2, arg3)
+
+In this case, "func-name" will receive " arg1", " arg2", " arg3". The presence
+of leading spaces may really matter depending on the function. The same applies
+to Make - for example, $(subst .c, .o, $(sources)) is a typical mistake.
+
+In Make, a user-defined function is referenced by using a built-in function,
+'call', like this:
+
+ $(call my-func,arg1,arg2,arg3)
+
+Kconfig invokes user-defined functions and built-in functions in the same way.
+The omission of 'call' makes the syntax shorter.
+
+In Make, some functions exceptionally treat commas verbatim instead of argument
+separators. For example, $(shell echo hello, world) evaluates to "hello, world".
+Likewise, $(info hello, world) prints "hello, world" to stdout. You could say
+this is _useful_ inconsistency.
+
+For simpler implementation and grammatical consistency, Kconfig always treats
+commas that appear in the $( ) form as delimiters. It means
+
+ $(shell, echo hello, world)
+
+is an error because it is passing two parameters where the 'shell' function
+accepts only one. To pass commas in arguments, you can use the following trick:
+
+ comma := ,
+ $(shell, echo hello$(comma) world)
+
+
+Caveats
+-------
+
+A variable (or function) cannot be expanded across tokens. So, you cannot use
+a variable as a shorthand for an expression that consists of multiple tokens.
+The following works:
+
+ RANGE_MIN := 1
+ RANGE_MAX := 3
+
+ config FOO
+ int "foo"
+ range $(RANGE_MIN) $(RANGE_MAX)
+
+But, the following does not work:
+
+ RANGES := 1 3
+
+ config FOO
+ int "foo"
+ range $(RANGES)
+
+A variable cannot be expanded to any keyword in Kconfig. The following does
+not work:
+
+ MY_TYPE := tristate
+
+ config FOO
+ $(MY_TYPE) "foo"
+ default y
+
+Obviously from the design, $(shell command) is expanded in the textual
+substitution phase. You cannot pass symbols to the 'shell' function.
+The following does not work as expected.
+
+ config ENDIAN_FLAG
+ string
+ default "-mbig-endian" if CPU_BIG_ENDIAN
+ default "-mlittle-endian" if CPU_LITTLE_ENDIAN
+
+ config CC_HAS_ENDIAN_FLAG
+ def_bool $(shell $(srctree)/scripts/gcc-check-flag ENDIAN_FLAG)
+
+Instead, you can do like follows so that any function call is statically
+expanded.
+
+ config CC_HAS_ENDIAN_FLAG
+ bool
+ default $(shell $(srctree)/scripts/gcc-check-flag -mbig-endian) if CPU_BIG_ENDIAN
+ default $(shell $(srctree)/scripts/gcc-check-flag -mlittle-endian) if CPU_LITTLE_ENDIAN
diff --git a/MAINTAINERS b/MAINTAINERS
index 58b9861..b7d7ae61 100644
--- a/MAINTAINERS
+++ b/MAINTAINERS
@@ -7632,7 +7632,7 @@ M: Masahiro Yamada <yamada.masahiro@socionext.com>
T: git git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/masahiroy/linux-kbuild.git kconfig
L: linux-kbuild@vger.kernel.org
S: Maintained
-F: Documentation/kbuild/kconfig-language.txt
+F: Documentation/kbuild/kconfig*
F: scripts/kconfig/

KDUMP
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