Re: modem mode switching

[Dan Williams <dcbw@redhat.com>]

On Thu, 2009-08-13 at 17:59 +0200, Kay Sievers wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 17:40, Ozan Çağlayan<ozan@pardus.org.tr> wrote:
> > I wonder why there are two different userspace utilities for mode
> > switching on HSDPA modems. modem-modeswitch is shipped with udev,
> > usb_modeswitch is another project which is maintained as well.
> >
> > Do they diverge in some point? If not, are there any plan to merge them
> > together? I'm not sure but relevant kernel drivers for those modems
> > seems to also have some sort of mode switching. When I plug my Huawei
> > device which isn't listed in neither udev rules for the userspace, it
> > first gets probed as an unknown 0xffffffff device and then it gets
> > reconnected and probbed as a serial modem. If kernel-space is able to
> > handle those kind of quirks, why the user space mode switching tools exist?
> 
> Dan should know.

Various reasons, none of which I care about any more, since the tool
works and as long as there's *something* that does the job, that's
great.

We could move the mobile action code into a separate binary since it
doesn't look like it would be that easy to fit into usb_modeswitch's
current architecture.

It also looks like it doesn't distribute a udev rules file by default,
that would be good to keep upstream, since they are clearly not thinking
about distributions, but individual users, which is pretty
short-sighted:

"You should have a folder named "/etc/udev" or similar. Somewhere in
there (I have a folder "rules.d") you find some files with the extension
".rules". Create a new one (or edit an existing one, but by convention
not the default "50-something.rules"). I chose one named
"45-hotplug.rules" since hotplugging is what USB is about after all.
In the chosen/new file add the line

SUBSYSTEM="usb", SYSFS{idProduct}="<YourDefaultProdID>", SYSFS{idVendor}="<YourDefaultVendID>", RUN+="<YourPathToUSB_ModeSwitch>"
"

Obviously for a distro, we need this to run for any USB devices that are
specified in usb_modeswitch's config file, and that means we also need
to uncomment everything in that file when actually putting it in a
distro.

Dan