When writing tests, it'd often be very useful to be able to intercept calls to a function in the code being tested and replace it with a test-specific stub. This has always been an obviously missing piece of KUnit, and the solutions always involve some tradeoffs with cleanliness, performance, or impact on non-test code. See the folowing document for some of the challenges: https://kunit.dev/mocking.html
This series consists of two prototype patches which add support for this sort of redirection to KUnit tests:
1: static_stub: Any function which might want to be intercepted adds a call to a macro which checks if a test has redirected calls to it, and calls the corresponding replacement.
2: ftrace_stub: Functions are intercepted using ftrace and livepatch. This doesn't require adding a new prologue to each function being replaced, but does have more dependencies (which restricts it to a small number of architectures, not including UML), and doesn't work well with inline functions.
The API for both implementations is very similar, so it should be easy to migrate from one to the other if necessary. Both of these implementations restrict the redirection to the test context: it is automatically undone after the KUnit test completes, and does not affect calls in other threads. If CONFIG_KUNIT is not enabled, there should be no overhead in either implementation.
Does either (or both) of these features sound useful, and is this sort-of API the right model? (Personally, I think there's a reasonable scope for both.) Is anything obviously missing or wrong? Do the names, descriptions etc. make any sense?
Note that these patches are definitely still at the "prototype" level, and things like error-handling, documentation, and testing are still pretty sparse. There is also quite a bit of room for optimisation. These'll all be improved for v1 if the concept seems good.
Cheers, -- David
Daniel Latypov (1): kunit: expose ftrace-based API for stubbing out functions during tests
David Gow (1): kunit: Expose 'static stub' API to redirect functions
include/kunit/ftrace_stub.h | 84 +++++++++++++++++ include/kunit/static_stub.h | 106 +++++++++++++++++++++ lib/kunit/Kconfig | 11 +++ lib/kunit/Makefile | 5 + lib/kunit/ftrace_stub.c | 138 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ lib/kunit/kunit-example-test.c | 64 +++++++++++++ lib/kunit/static_stub.c | 125 +++++++++++++++++++++++++ lib/kunit/stubs_example.kunitconfig | 11 +++ 8 files changed, 544 insertions(+) create mode 100644 include/kunit/ftrace_stub.h create mode 100644 include/kunit/static_stub.h create mode 100644 lib/kunit/ftrace_stub.c create mode 100644 lib/kunit/static_stub.c create mode 100644 lib/kunit/stubs_example.kunitconfig