Re: [PATCH v2 00/17] Adding support for controlling the leds found on Intel NUC

From: Marek Behún
Date: Thu May 20 2021 - 12:19:26 EST


On Thu, 20 May 2021 01:07:20 +0200
Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> So, the first thing that the API needs is a way to tell what LED
> is monitoring the device's power state.

If a LED can monitor the device's power state in HW, register a LED
private trigger for this LED. If the LED is configured into this state
by default, you can set this trigger to be the default_trigger prior
registering the LED. The name of this private trigger can be
"hw:powerstate" or something like that (I wonder what others will
think about this name).

> Then, for each power state (S0, S3, S5), define if the LED will
> be ON all the times or not.
>
> The "slowing breathing" is one of the possible blink patterns.
> The driver supports 4 other blink patterns
>
> - Solid - the LED won't blink;
> - Breathing - it looks like a sinusoidal wave pattern;
> - Pulsing - it looks like a square wave pattern;
> - Strobing - it turns ON suddenly, and then it slowly turns OFF.
>
> The speed of the blink is also adjustable, ranging from 0.1 Hz to 1 Hz,
> on 0.1 Hz steps.

Is the speed of breathing/strobing also adjustable? Or only when
pulsing?

When this "hw:powerstate" trigger is enabled for this LED,
only then another sysfs files should appear in this LED's sysfs
directory.

> ---
>
> Let me explain this specific part of the API from my original proposal.
>
> Those are the led names from the datasheets (NUC 8 and above),
> and my proposal for the sysfs class directory name:
>
> ============= ===============================
> LED name sysfs
> ============= ===============================
> Skull ``/sys/class/leds/nuc::skull``
> Skull eyes ``/sys/class/leds/nuc::eyes``
> Power ``/sys/class/leds/nuc::power``
> HDD ``/sys/class/leds/nuc::hdd``
> Front1 ``/sys/class/leds/nuc::front1``
> Front2 ``/sys/class/leds/nuc::front2``
> Front3 ``/sys/class/leds/nuc::front3``
> ============= ===============================
>
> For each of the above, there's the need to identify what
> hardware function is monitored (if any).
>
> My proposal were to add an "indicator" node (the name came from
> the Intel datasheets) that shows what led will monitor the power state.
>
> Then, one blink_behavior and one blink_frequency per power state,
> e. g.:
>
> /sys/class/leds/nuc::front1
> |-- indicator
> |-- s0_blink_behavior
> |-- s0_blink_frequency
> |-- s3_blink_behavior
> |-- s3_blink_frequency
> |-- s5_blink_behavior
> `-- s5_blink_frequency

I'd rather use one file for frequencies and one for intervals, and map
in to an array, but that is just my preference...

>
> PS.: I don't care much about what names we'll use. Feel free to
> rename them, if you think the above is not clear or generic enough.
>
> -
>
> To make part of the API complete, there's also the need of a node
> to control the max brightness that the leds will achieve at the
> ON state, and another one to control the color on each state,
> as one could define, let's say, "white" when powered on, "blue"
> when suspended and "yellow" when hibernating. The colors at the
> NUC I have are RGB (but other models can use an enum for the
> supported colors).
>
> /sys/class/leds/nuc::front1
> |-- s0_brightness
> |-- s0_color # only shown on colored leds
> |-- s3_brightness
> |-- s3_color # only shown on colored leds
> |-- s0_brightness
> `-- s5_color # only shown on colored leds

If the BIOS reports a LED being full RGB LED, you should register it
via multicolor framework. Regarding the enum with 8 colors: are these
colors red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta? Because if so, then
this is RGB with each channel being binary :) So you can again use
multicolor framework.