Controlling a USB power supply (on/off) with linux

Is it possible to turn on/off power supplies from USB manually with linux?

There's this external USB cooling fan (the kind you use to cool yourself off, not the PC), and it would be nice to be able to control it from the terminal, because I want to position the fan somewhere far away.

I suppose this could also be useful for a variety of other things as well, because there's a lot of USB toys out there. Maybe air purifiers etc (I heard they don't really work though).


Note. The information in this answer is relevant for the older kernels (up to 2.6.32). See tlwhitec's answer for the information on the newer kernels.

# disable external wake-up; do this only once
echo disabled > /sys/bus/usb/devices/usb1/power/wakeup 

echo on > /sys/bus/usb/devices/usb1/power/level       # turn on
echo suspend > /sys/bus/usb/devices/usb1/power/level  # turn off

(You may need to change usb1 to usb n)

Source: Documentation/usb/power-management.txt.gz


According to the docs , there were several changes to the USB power management from kernels 2.6.32 , which seem to settle in 2.6.38 . Now you'll need to wait for the device to become idle , which is governed by the particular device driver. The driver needs to support it, otherwise the device will never reach this state. Unluckily, now the user has no chance to force this. However, if you're lucky and your device can become idle, then to turn this off you need to:

echo "0" > "/sys/bus/usb/devices/usbX/power/autosuspend"
echo "auto" > "/sys/bus/usb/devices/usbX/power/level"

or, for kernels around 2.6.38 and above:

echo "0" > "/sys/bus/usb/devices/usbX/power/autosuspend_delay_ms"
echo "auto" > "/sys/bus/usb/devices/usbX/power/control"

This literally means, go suspend at the moment the device becomes idle.

So unless your fan is something "intelligent" that can be seen as a device and controlled by a driver, you probably won't have much luck on current kernels.


I have found these solutions that at least work for properly configured Terminus FE 1.1 USB hub chip:

1.To turn off power on all USB ports of a hub, you may unbind the hub from kernel using:

echo "1-4.4.4" > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usb/unbind

to turn power back on - you may bind it back using

echo "1-4.4.4" > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usb/bind

2.Switching power at each port individually is trickier: I was able to use hubpower to control each port - but it comes with a downside: hubpower first disconnects the usbdevfs wich causes all of the USB devices to disconect from system, at least on ubuntu:

usb_ioctl.ioctl_code = USBDEVFS_DISCONNECT;
rc = ioctl(fd, USBDEVFS_IOCTL, &usb_ioctl);

With this ioctl disabled I was able to switch off individual port power without detaching all devices - but the power goes back on immediately (probably due to kernel seeing an uninitialized device) which causes USB device just to do a "cold restart" which is what I generally wanted to do. My patched hubpower is here

链接地址: http://www.djcxy.com/p/81294.html

上一篇: Android USB OTG:以编程方式关闭端口电源

下一篇: 用linux控制USB电源(开/关)