[Nut-upsdev] usbhid-ups pull request for consideration

[Stephen J. Butler]

On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 7:46 AM, Charles Lepple <clepple at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Apr 19, 2014, at 1:23 AM, Stephen J. Butler wrote:
> > 2. With my hardware and kernel, usbhid-ups wouldn't run more than 10
> minutes before exiting with a fatal error. This seems to be related to
> holding usb_claim_interface() the entire life of the program. I've
> refactored claim_interface/release_interface calls to be around only when
> work is being done. Now usbhid-ups has run for 24+ hours without issue.
>
> Given how long we have been running with code that claims the interface at
> driver startup, I am a wary about changing this behavior. Have you had a
> chance to raise this with the Linux USB folks? I don't see any reason why
> claiming the interface for an indefinite amount of time shouldn't be
> expected to work.
>

No, I haven't. I'm not entirely convinced it's the kernel or libusb causing
my problems. I half believe it could be some other userland program
running. For example, I had no idea I had dbus running upower before
debugging this issue.

I didn't go as far as doing a stap on it. The more I thought of it, the
more I decided that usbhid-ups should allow other programs on the system to
claim the device if they want.


> We will, of course, need to test this on other models of UPS which are
> supported by usbhid-ups.
>
> Assuming for a moment that the fatal error is due to a regression in the
> kernel, are there other general advantages to only claiming when needed?


I noticed when hacking around in libusb.c that there was a comment in
libusb_close() about not calling usb_release_interface() because it hangs.
That doesn't seem right to me, and I couldn't find any other libusb
examples that advocated claiming the device the lifetime of the program. I
wonder if it wasn't an early symptom of this.

As far as testing, it does seem like a risky change.


> I would be a lot more excited about retesting all of this if we could
> somehow leverage udev (or equivalent, on non-Linux) to make this
> event-driven. Then, the individual drivers don't have to deal with
> reconnection, and when the UPS disappears for any reason, the driver simply
> exits. The problem for libusb-0.1 is that I don't know of a clean way to
> pass a udev device specification to usb_open(). (Insert rant about most USB
> devices not having unique serial numbers in their device descriptors.)
>
> Thoughts? Has anyone implemented a similar udev-to-application handoff in
> libusb-1.x?


Nope, no udev experience. And certainly not on other platforms.
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