[Buildroot] [PATCH 1/1] support/testing/infra/emulator.py: prevent the commands from wrapping

Edgar Bonet bonet at grenoble.cnrs.fr
Tue Oct 5 17:17:58 UTC 2021


Traditional VT-10x terminals (and their emulators) have a "magic
margins" feature that enables the last character position to be updated
without scrolling the screen: whenever a character is printed on the
last column, the cursor stays over the character, instead of moving to
the next line.

The Busybox shell, ash, attempts to defeat this feature by printing
CF,LF right after echoing a character to the last column.[1] This
doesn't play well with emulator.py. The run() method of the Emulator
class captures the output of the emulated system and assumes the first
line it reads is the echo of the command, and all subsequent lines are
the command's output. If the line made by the command + shell prompt is
longer than 80 characters, then it is echoed as two or more lines, and
all but the first one are mistaken for the command's output.

We fix this by telling the emulated system that we are using an
ultra-wide terminal with 29999 columns. Larger values would be ignored
and replaced by the default, namely 80 columns.[2]

[1] https://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/libbb/lineedit.c?h=1_34_0#n412
[2] https://git.busybox.net/busybox/tree/libbb/xfuncs.c?h=1_34_0#n258

Signed-off-by: Edgar Bonet <bonet at grenoble.cnrs.fr>
Reported-by: Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni at bootlin.com>
Co-authored-by: Yann E. MORIN <yann.morin.1998 at free.fr>
---
 support/testing/infra/emulator.py | 2 ++
 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)

Note that I tested that the command

    stty columns 29999

does fix the wrapping behavior on an actual board, while using a serial
connection. I did not test the script emulator.py, as I am unfamiliar
with the testing infrastructure. Would someone volunteer to do that
test?

diff --git a/support/testing/infra/emulator.py b/support/testing/infra/emulator.py
index 0a77eb80fc..f1f5eac3a8 100644
--- a/support/testing/infra/emulator.py
+++ b/support/testing/infra/emulator.py
@@ -100,6 +100,8 @@ class Emulator(object):
         if index != 0:
             raise SystemError("Cannot login")
         self.run("dmesg -n 1")
+        # Prevent the shell from wrapping the commands at 80 columns.
+        self.run("stty columns 29999")
 
     # Run the given 'cmd' with a 'timeout' on the target
     # return a tuple (output, exit_code)
-- 
2.25.1


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