29 July 2005, Cambridge, MA:

This afternoon Alan Stern submitted a patch to remove the URB_ASYNC_UNLINK
flag from the Linux kernel.  Mr. Stern explained, "This flag is a relic
from an earlier, less-well-designed system.  For over a year it hasn't
been used for anything other than printing warning messages."

An anonymous spokesman for the Linux kernel development community
commented, "This is exactly the sort of thing we see happening all the
time.  As the kernel evolves, support for old techniques and old code can
be jettisoned and replaced by newer, better approaches.  Proprietary
operating systems do not have the freedom or flexibility to change so
quickly."

Mr. Stern, a staff member at Harvard University's Rowland Institute who
works on Linux only as a hobby, noted that the patch (labelled as548) did
not update two files, keyspan.c and option.c, in the USB drivers' "serial"
subdirectory.  "Those files need more extensive changes," he remarked.
"They examine the status field of several URBs at times when they're not
supposed to.  That will need to be fixed before the URB_ASYNC_UNLINK flag
is removed."

Greg Kroah-Hartman, the kernel maintainer responsible for overseeing all
of Linux's USB drivers, did not respond to our inquiries or return our
calls.  His only comment was "Applied, thanks."
Signed-off-by: NAlan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu>
Signed-off-by: NGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>

This patch introduces a /sys/class/usb_device/ class
where every connected usb-device will show up:

  tree /sys/class/usb_device/
  /sys/class/usb_device/
  |-- usb1.1
  |   |-- dev
  |   `-- device -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.0/usb1
  |-- usb2.1
  |   |-- dev
  |   `-- device -> ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.1/usb2
  ...

The presence of the "dev" file lets udev create real device nodes.
  kay@pim:~/src/linux-2.6> tree /dev/bus/usb/
  /dev/bus/usb/
  |-- 1
  |   `-- 1
  |-- 2
  |   `-- 1
  ...

udev rule:
  SUBSYSTEM="usb_device", PROGRAM="/sbin/usb_device %k", NAME="%c"
  (echo $1 | /bin/sed 's/usb\([0-9]*\)\.\([0-9]*\)/bus\/usb\/\1\/\2/')

This makes libusb pick up the real nodes instead of the mounted usbfs:
  export USB_DEVFS_PATH=/dev/bus/usb

Background:
  All this makes it possible to manage usb devices with udev instead of
  the devfs solution. We are currently working on a pam_console/resmgr
  replacement driven by udev and a pam-helper. It applies ACL's to device
  nodes, which is required for modern desktop functionalty like
  "Fast User Switching" or multiple local login support.

New patch with its own major. I've succesfully disabled usbfs and use real
nodes only on my box. With: "export USB_DEVFS_PATH=/dev/bus/usb" libusb picks
up the udev managed nodes instead of reading usbfs files.

This makes udev to provide symlinks for libusb to pick up:
  SUBSYSTEM="usb_device", PROGRAM="/sbin/usbdevice %k", SYMLINK="%c"

/sbin/usbdevice:
  #!/bin/sh
  echo $1 | /bin/sed 's/usbdev\([0-9]*\)\.\([0-9]*\)/bus\/usb\/\1\/\2/'
Signed-off-by: NKay Sievers <kay.sievers@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: NGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>

Greg,

This patch fixes the kmalloc() flags argument type in USB
subsystem; hopefully all of its occurences. The patch was
made against patch-2.6.12-git2 from Jun 20.

Cleanup of flags for kmalloc() in USB subsystem.
Signed-off-by: NOlav Kongas <ok@artecdesign.ee>
Signed-off-by: NGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>

This makes the USB_MON less confusing.
Signed-off-by: NAdrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>
Signed-off-by: NLinus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

This moves a kref into the main hcd structure, which detaches it from
the class device structure.
Signed-off-by: NGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>

On Wed, May 04, 2005 at 01:37:30PM -0700, David Brownell wrote:
> On Wednesday 04 May 2005 12:19 pm, Roman Kagan wrote:
> > struct urb {
> > 	/* private, usb core and host controller only fields in the urb */
> > 	...
> > 	struct list_head urb_list;	/* list pointer to all active urbs */
> > 	...
> > };
> >
> > Is it safe to use it for driver's purposes when the driver owns the urb,
> > that is, starting from the completion routine until the urb is submitted
> > with usb_submit_urb()?
>
> Right now, it should be.

Great!  FWIW I've briefly tested a modified version of usbatm using
the list head in struct urb instead of creating a wrapper struct, and I
haven't seen any failures yet.  So I tend to believe that your "should
be" actually means "is" :)

> > If it is, can it be guaranteed in future, e.g.
> > by moving the list head into the public section of struct urb?
>
> In fact I'm not sure why it ever got called "private" to usbcore/hcds.
> I thought the idea was that it should be like urb->status, reserved for
> whoever controls the URB.

OK then how about the following (essentially documentation) patch?
Signed-off-by: NRoman Kagan <rkagan@mail.ru>
Acked-by: NDavid Brownell <david-b@pacbell.net>
Signed-off-by: NGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>

This is the first of a few installments of PM API updates to match the
recent switch to "pm_message_t".  This installment primarily affects
USB device drivers (for USB interfaces), and it changes the handful of
drivers which currently implement suspend methods:

    - <linux/usb.h> and usbcore, signature change

    - Some drivers only changed the signature, net effect this just
      shuts up "sparse -Wbitwise":
	* hid-core
	* stir4200

    - Two network drivers did that, and also grew slightly more
      featureful suspend code ... they now properly shut down
      their activities.  (As should stir4200...)
	* pegasus
	* usbnet

Note that the Wake-On-Lan (WOL) support in pegasus doesn't yet work; looks
to me like it's missing a request to turn it on, vs just configuring it.
The ASIX code in usbnet also has WOL hooks that are ready to use; untested.
Signed-off-by: NDavid Brownell <dbrownell@users.sourceforge.net>
Signed-off-by: NAndrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: NGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>

Index: gregkh-2.6/drivers/net/irda/stir4200.c
===================================================================

Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.

Let it rip!