On Fri, 2007-02-03 at 15:16 +0100, Florian Fainelli wrote: > Hi, > > Le vendredi 2 mars 2007, jamal a écrit : > > Where are these LEDs typically located? Are you talking about LEDs on a > > network card for example? can you light them up in different colors? > > Those LEDS are typically controlled by GPIO lines visible in front of the > device. It is mostly targeted to embedded devices for which you do not > necessarily want to assign a LED to a given network interface >
Ah, ok - ive worked with a not-so-embedded board that had something that was accessible via the ICH; i recall writting a user-space program to handle it. So instead of calling this just LED, probably find a more descriptive name for it; Example GPIO-LED. Those things are tricky to have in a generic code though, no? I.e each chipset/board will have different address mappings on where to read/write for a specific LED. So you need to deal with that problem without requiring changing of the kernel every time an address changes. I actually found exactly similar board (some manufacturer) but the firmware was slightly different. Heres my view of what would be useful: Have them accessible via the kernel, but also have an API from user space. This way user space apps can control the LED, but if i wanted to do it from the kernel i could as well. In my case i was actually monitoring the health of a daemon; it would show off if the daemon was not running, green if it was happy, yellow if semi-healthy and Red if it was in trouble. here are some operations/messages i can see that are useful which you probably already have in your API: turn on LED at #x color somecolor turn off LED at #y query LED info at #x dump all LEDs on board - think of this as a discovery flicker LED at #z at frequency y color green maybe even: "I am a wireless card with no LED, I claim LED #x" which is matched by "tell me if anyone owns LED code" In other words, if you just provide mechanims let people write the policies. This way if i wanted to tie it to my eth0 i can. Hope that helps. cheers, jamal - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
