[linux] 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).

PowerTOP from Intel allows you to toggle devices such as usb peripherals in real-time. These are called 'tunables'.

sudo apt install powertop
sudo powertop

• Tab over to 'tunables'.
• Scroll down to your device.
• Hit enter to toggle power saving mode (Good/Bad)

Note that Bad means the device is always on. Toggling to Good will turn off the device after the preset inactive saving time (default is 2000ms).

See the PowerTOP docs for details on how to make these changes permanent.
It generates the config scripts for you (pretty much as described by other posters on this thread).

NOTE: These scripts do not affect USB pin power (which is always on).
These only send the driver protocol to activate and deactivate a device.

If you want to control pin power, you could use either a supported smart USB hub, or better yet a microcontroller.

The reason why folks post questions such as this is due to the dreaded- indeed "EVIL"- USB Auto-Suspend "feature".

Auto suspend winds-down the power to an "idle" USB device and unless the device's driver supports this feature correctly, the device can become uncontactable. So powering a USB port on/off is a symptom of the problem, not the problem in itself.

I'll show you how to GLOBALLY disable auto-suspend, negating the need to manually toggle the USB ports on & off:

Short Answer:

You do NOT need to edit "autosuspend_delay_ms" individually: USB autosuspend can be disabled globally and PERSISTENTLY using the following commands:

sed -i 's/GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="/&usbcore.autosuspend=-1 /' /etc/default/grub

update-grub

systemctl reboot

An Ubuntu 18.04 screen-grab follows at the end of the "Long Answer" illustrating how my results were achieved.

Long Answer:

It's true that the USB Power Management Kernel Documentation states autosuspend is to be deprecated and in in its' place "autosuspend_delay_ms" used to disable USB autosuspend:

"In 2.6.38 the "autosuspend" file will be deprecated
and replaced by the "autosuspend_delay_ms" file."

HOWEVER my testing reveals that setting usbcore.autosuspend=-1 in /etc/default/grub as below can be used as a GLOBAL toggle for USB autosuspend functionality- you do NOT need to edit individual "autosuspend_delay_ms" files.

The same document linked above states a value of "0" is ENABLED and a negative value is DISABLED:

power/autosuspend_delay_ms

    <snip> 0 means to autosuspend
    as soon as the device becomes idle, and negative
    values mean never to autosuspend.  You can write a
    number to the file to change the autosuspend
    idle-delay time.

In the annotated Ubuntu 18.04 screen-grab below illustrating how my results were achieved (and reproducible), please remark the default is "0" (enabled) in autosuspend_delay_ms.

Then note that after ONLY setting usbcore.autosuspend=-1 in Grub, these values are now negative (disabled) after reboot. This will save me the bother of editing individual values and can now script disabling USB autosuspend.

Hope this makes disabling USB autosuspend a little easier and more scriptable-

You could use my tool uhubctl to control USB power per port for compatible USB hubs.

echo '2-1' |sudo tee /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usb/unbind

works for ubuntu

USB 5v power is always on (even when the computer is turned off, on some computers and on some ports.) You will probably need to program an Arduino with some sort of switch, and control it via Serial library from USB plugged in to the computer.

In other words, a combination of this switch tutorial and this tutorial on communicating via Serial libary to Arduino plugged in via USB.

I wanted to do this, and with my USB hardware I couldn't. I wrote a hacky way how to do it here:

http://pintant.cat/2012/05/12/power-off-usb-device/ .

In a short way: I used a USB relay to open/close the V_CC of another USB cable...

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 had a problem when connecting my android phone, I couldn't charge my phone because the power switch on and then off ... PowerTop let me find this setting and was useful to fix the issue ( auto value was causing issue):

echo 'on' | sudo tee /sys/bus/usb/devices/1-1/power/control

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