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This was originally asked on Stack Overflow, but it was closed for being off-topic. Hopefully this is the right forum for the question.

I'm writing a character device driver that exposes class and device attributes under sysfs. I'm using udev to make the devices that appear in /dev read/writable by a certain group, but I can't figure out how to make the sysfs attributes writable by the same group without a shell script.

$ ls -l /dev/foobar crw-rw---- 1 root my_group 241, 0 Jan 4 21:57 /dev/foobar # ownership applied by udev $ ls -l /sys/class/my_class/wo_attribute --w--w---- 1 root root 4096 Jan 4 22:02 wo_attribute # still in root group :/ $ ls -l /sys/class/my_class/my_device/rw_attribute -rw-rw-r-- 1 root root 4096 Jan 4 22:13 rw_attribute # ditto

I've tried using udevadm info to match the KERNEL and SUBSYSTEM keys of the sysfs path to no effect. I've also found the udev_event and get_ownership fields of struct class; I haven't had luck with the former and the latter works for device attributes, but I have to hard code my_group's gid which is not ideal.

Here's an example of trying to find the right match keys for the class:

$ udevadm info -a /sys/class/my_module looking at device '/class/my_class': KERNEL=="my_class" SUBSYSTEM=="subsystem" DRIVER=="" ATTR{wo_attribute}=="(not readable)" looking at parent device '/class': KERNELS=="class" SUBSYSTEMS=="" DRIVERS=="" ATTRS{devcoredump/disabled}=="0" ATTRS{drm/version}=="drm 1.1.0 20060810" ATTRS{firmware/timeout}=="60" ATTRS{gpio/export}=="(not readable)" ATTRS{gpio/unexport}=="(not readable)" ATTRS{my_class/wo_attribute}=="(not readable)"

But the udev rule KERNEL=="my_class", GROUP="my_group" doesn't work.

Does udev only work with devices under /dev, or is there a way to apply the rules to sysfs attributes?

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Big failure by the Stackoverflow admins. Should have been closed as a duplicate... ;-) Here is your answer:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/70293974/how-do-i-make-my-kernel-modules-sysfs-entry-be-owned-by-a-non-root-user

udev cannot be used to set file permissions in /sys, only in /dev. The SO admins probably read "udev" and immediately assumed "admin stuff".

So the useful approach is to do this in the driver code. You could do it with udev by adding RUN= entries for chmod and chgrp.

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  • That would tie driver code to knowledge of specific group IDs, which is not the norm in Linux (the tty group is the only exception I've seen), and indeed avoiding that sort of thing is the whole purpose of udev rules... Commented Jan 7 at 20:00
  • Thanks Hauke. The question you linked was asking how to change ownership from within the driver, which I know how to do, but want to avoid. But rules with RUN worked: SUBSYSTEM=="my_class", GROUP="my_group", RUN="/usr/bin/chown -R root:my_group /sys$devpath". Commented Jan 7 at 22:55

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