kernel-ark/Documentation/leds/ledtrig-usbport.txt
Rafał Miłecki 0f247626cb usb: core: Introduce a USB port LED trigger
This commit adds a new trigger responsible for turning on LED when USB
device gets connected to the selected USB port. This can can useful for
various home routers that have USB port(s) and a proper LED telling user
a device is connected.

The trigger gets its documentation file but basically it just requires
enabling it and selecting USB ports (e.g. echo 1 > ports/usb1-1).

There was a long discussion on design of this driver. Its current state
is a result of picking them most adjustable solution as others couldn't
handle all cases.

1) It wasn't possible for the driver to register separated trigger for
   each USB port. Some physical USB ports are handled by more than one
   controller and so by more than one USB port. E.g. USB 2.0 physical
   port may be handled by OHCI's port and EHCI's port.
   It's also not possible to assign more than 1 trigger to a single LED
   and implementing such feature would be tricky due to syncing triggers
   and sysfs conflicts with old triggers.

2) Another idea was to register trigger per USB hub. This wouldn't allow
   handling devices with multiple USB LEDs and controllers (hubs)
   controlling more than 1 physical port. It's common for hubs to have
   few ports and each may have its own LED.

This final trigger is highly flexible. It allows selecting any USB ports
for any LED. It was also modified (comparing to the initial version) to
allow choosing ports rather than having user /guess/ proper names. It
was successfully tested on SmartRG SR400ac which has 3 USB LEDs,
2 physical ports and 3 controllers.

It was noted USB subsystem already has usb-gadget and usb-host triggers
but they are pretty trivial ones. They indicate activity only and can't
have ports specified.

In future it may be good idea to consider adding activity support to
usbport as well. This should allow switching to this more generic driver
and maybe marking old ones as obsolete.
This can be implemented with another sysfs file for setting mode. The
default mode wouldn't change so there won't be ABI breakage and so such
feature can be safely implemented later.

There was also an idea of supporting other devices (PCI, SDIO, etc.) but
as this driver already contains some USB specific code (and will get
more) these should be probably separated drivers (triggers).

Signed-off-by: Rafał Miłecki <rafal@milecki.pl>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
2016-09-27 12:20:17 +02:00

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USB port LED trigger
====================
This LED trigger can be used for signalling to the user a presence of USB device
in a given port. It simply turns on LED when device appears and turns it off
when it disappears.
It requires selecting USB ports that should be observed. All available ones are
listed as separated entries in a "ports" subdirectory. Selecting is handled by
echoing "1" to a chosen port.
Please note that this trigger allows selecting multiple USB ports for a single
LED. This can be useful in two cases:
1) Device with single USB LED and few physical ports
In such a case LED will be turned on as long as there is at least one connected
USB device.
2) Device with a physical port handled by few controllers
Some devices may have one controller per PHY standard. E.g. USB 3.0 physical
port may be handled by ohci-platform, ehci-platform and xhci-hcd. If there is
only one LED user will most likely want to assign ports from all 3 hubs.
This trigger can be activated from user space on led class devices as shown
below:
echo usbport > trigger
This adds sysfs attributes to the LED that are documented in:
Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-class-led-trigger-usbport
Example use-case:
echo usbport > trigger
echo 1 > ports/usb1-port1
echo 1 > ports/usb2-port1
cat ports/usb1-port1
echo 0 > ports/usb1-port1