On Mon, 23 Jan 2006, Steve Finney wrote:

> Back in June 2004, Alan Stern answered a question about whether
> it was possible to power off individual USB ports via /sys with
> a resounding "No". Has this changed in later kernel versions? I notice
> there is a devices/*/power/state file which is writeable.

Let me give a more careful answer.  You _can_ power off individual USB 
ports _provided_ the hardware supports it.  A user program to do exactly 
that was posted on this list within the last couple of weeks.

That having been said, you should note that almost none of the USB
controller hardware found in desktop/laptop computers and a surprisingly
small percentage of external hubs support port power control.  (I say
surprisingly because power control is a requirement in the USB 2.0 spec,
so to me anything less than 100% is surprising.)

> Our particular issue is that we have a USB flash device which sometimes
> doesn't enumerate, and we're interested in whether there's a (simple)
> way from user space software to force a re-enumeration of that 
> port only. Currently we have a monolithic kernel, so module unloading 
> is not an option (would that work if it were?).

Indeed it would.

Another way to force re-enumeration is to unbind the hub driver from the
root hub and then rebind it.  This can be accomplished by a simple shell
script, using sysfs (if your kernel is sufficiently recent).  It would
probably be good enough just to do a runtime suspend & resume of the root
hub's interface; also doable by a simple shell script.

By the way, does your flash device sometimes fail to enumerate when 
attached to a host running Windows?  Do you have any idea why it fails to 
enumerate?  Is it something wrong with the device or something that needs 
to be fixed in the Linux stack?

Alan Stern



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