linux/Documentation/usb/anchors.txt
Oliver Neukum e6a79f1f07 USB: add Documentation about usb_anchor
This adds documentation about the new usb anchor infrastructure.

Signed-off-by: Oliver Neukum <oneukum@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@suse.de>
2008-04-24 21:16:51 -07:00

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What is anchor?
===============
A USB driver needs to support some callbacks requiring
a driver to cease all IO to an interface. To do so, a
driver has to keep track of the URBs it has submitted
to know they've all completed or to call usb_kill_urb
for them. The anchor is a data structure takes care of
keeping track of URBs and provides methods to deal with
multiple URBs.
Allocation and Initialisation
=============================
There's no API to allocate an anchor. It is simply declared
as struct usb_anchor. init_usb_anchor() must be called to
initialise the data structure.
Deallocation
============
Once it has no more URBs associated with it, the anchor can be
freed with normal memory management operations.
Association and disassociation of URBs with anchors
===================================================
An association of URBs to an anchor is made by an explicit
call to usb_anchor_urb(). The association is maintained until
an URB is finished by (successfull) completion. Thus disassociation
is automatic. A function is provided to forcibly finish (kill)
all URBs associated with an anchor.
Furthermore, disassociation can be made with usb_unanchor_urb()
Operations on multitudes of URBs
================================
usb_kill_anchored_urbs()
------------------------
This function kills all URBs associated with an anchor. The URBs
are called in the reverse temporal order they were submitted.
This way no data can be reordered.
usb_wait_anchor_empty_timeout()
-------------------------------
This function waits for all URBs associated with an anchor to finish
or a timeout, whichever comes first. Its return value will tell you
whether the timeout was reached.