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LINUX HOTPLUGGING

In hotpluggable busses like USB (and Cardbus PCI), end-users plug devices

into the bus with power on.  In most cases, users expect the devices to become

immediately usable.  That means the system must do many things, including:

    - Find a driver that can handle the device.  That may involve

      loading a kernel module; newer drivers can use modutils to

      publish their device (and class) support to user utilities.

    - Bind a driver to that device.  Bus frameworks do that using a

      device driver's probe() routine.

    - Tell other subsystems to configure the new device.  Print

      queues may need to be enabled, networks brought up, disk

      partitions mounted, and so on.  In some cases these will

      be driver-specific actions.

This involves a mix of kernel mode and user mode actions.  Making devices

be immediately usable means that any user mode actions can't wait for an

administrator to do them:  the kernel must trigger them, either passively

(triggering some monitoring daemon to invoke a helper program) or

actively (calling such a user mode helper program directly).

Those triggered actions must support a system's administrative policies;

such programs are called "policy agents" here.  Typically they involve

shell scripts that dispatch to more familiar administration tools.

Because some of those actions rely on information about drivers (metadata)

that is currently available only when the drivers are dynamically linked,

you get the best hotplugging when you configure a highly modular system.

KERNEL HOTPLUG HELPER (/sbin/hotplug)

When you compile with CONFIG_HOTPLUG, you get a new kernel parameter:

/proc/sys/kernel/hotplug, which normally holds the pathname "/sbin/hotplug".

That parameter names a program which the kernel may invoke at various times.

The /sbin/hotplug program can be invoked by any subsystem as part of its

reaction to a configuration change, from a thread in that subsystem.

Only one parameter is required: the name of a subsystem being notified of

some kernel event.  That name is used as the first key for further event

dispatch; any other argument and environment parameters are specified by

the subsystem making that invocation.

Hotplug software and other resources is available at:

        http://linux-hotplug.sourceforge.net

Mailing list information is also available at that site.

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USB POLICY AGENT

The USB subsystem currently invokes /sbin/hotplug when USB devices

are added or removed from system.  The invocation is done by the kernel

hub daemon thread [khubd], or else as part of root hub initialization

(done by init, modprobe, kapmd, etc).  Its single command line parameter

is the string "usb", and it passes these environment variables:

    ACTION ... "add", "remove"

    PRODUCT ... USB vendor, product, and version codes (hex)

    TYPE ... device class codes (decimal)

    INTERFACE ... interface 0 class codes (decimal)

If "usbdevfs" is configured, DEVICE and DEVFS are also passed.  DEVICE is

the pathname of the device, and is useful for devices with multiple and/or

alternate interfaces that complicate driver selection.  By design, USB

hotplugging is independent of "usbdevfs":  you can do most essential parts

of USB device setup without using that filesystem, and without running a

user mode daemon to detect changes in system configuration.

Currently available policy agent implementations can load drivers for

modules, and can invoke driver-specific setup scripts.  The newest ones

leverage USB modutils support.  Later agents might unload drivers.

USB MODUTILS SUPPORT

Current versions of modutils will create a "modules.usbmap" file which

contains the entries from each driver's MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE.  Such files

can be used by various user mode policy agents to make sure all the right

driver modules get loaded, either at boot time or later.

See  for full information about such table entries; or look

at existing drivers.  Each table entry describes one or more criteria to

be used when matching a driver to a device or class of devices.  The

specific criteria are identified by bits set in "match_flags", paired

with field values.  You can construct the criteria directly, or with

macros such as these, and use driver_info to store more information.

    USB_DEVICE (vendorId, productId)

        ... matching devices with specified vendor and product ids

    USB_DEVICE_VER (vendorId, productId, lo, hi)

        ... like USB_DEVICE with lo <= productversion <= hi

    USB_INTERFACE_INFO (class, subclass, protocol)

        ... matching specified interface class info

    USB_DEVICE_INFO (class, subclass, protocol)

        ... matching specified device class info

A short example, for a driver that supports several specific USB devices

and their quirks, might have a MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE like this:

    static const struct usb_device_id mydriver_id_table = {

        { USB_DEVICE (0x9999, 0xaaaa), driver_info: QUIRK_X },

        { USB_DEVICE (0xbbbb, 0x8888), driver_info: QUIRK_Y|QUIRK_Z },

        ...

        { } /* end with an all-zeroes entry */

    }

    MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE (usb, mydriver_id_table);

Most USB device drivers should pass these tables to the USB subsystem as

well as to the module management subsystem.  Not all, though: some driver

frameworks connect using interfaces layered over USB, and so they won't

need such a "struct usb_driver".

Drivers that connect directly to the USB subsystem should be declared

something like this:

    static struct usb_driver mydriver = {

        name:           "mydriver",

        id_table:       mydriver_id_table,

        probe:          my_probe,

        disconnect:     my_disconnect,

        /*

        if using the usb chardev framework:

            minor:              MY_USB_MINOR_START,

            fops:               my_file_ops,

        if exposing any operations through usbdevfs:

            ioctl:              my_ioctl,

        */

    }

When the USB subsystem knows about a driver's device ID table, it's used when

choosing drivers to probe().  The thread doing new device processing checks

drivers' device ID entries from the MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE against interface and

device descriptors for the device.  It will only call probe() if there is a

match, and the third argument to probe() will be the entry that matched.

If you don't provide an id_table for your driver, then your driver may get

probed for each new device; the third parameter to probe() will be null.