Re: [PATCH v3 2/2] usb: typec: Expose Product Type VDOs via sysfs

[Prashant Malani]

Hi Heikki,

On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 01:54:53PM +0200, Heikki Krogerus wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 23, 2020 at 02:43:28PM -0700, Prashant Malani wrote:
> 
> I've now come to the conclusion that this is not the correct approach.
> Instead, the whole identity, all six VDOs, should be supplied
> separately with a "raw" sysfs attribute file after all.
> 
> The three attribute files that we already have - so id_header,
> cert_stat and product - can always supply the actual VDO as is,
> regardless of the product type, so they are fine. But these new
> attribute files, product_type_vdoX, would behave differently as they
> supply different information depending on the product type. That just
> does not feel right to me.

OOI: I'd like to understand the reservations around this approach. Can't
userspace just read these and then interpret them appropriately according
to the id_header as well as PD revision (and version number) if that's exposed?
The only thing I see changing is how we name those product_type_vdoX
sysfs files, i.e product_type_vdo0 == passive_cable_vdo OR active_cable_vdo1
depending on the product type.

That said, perhaps I'm missing some aspect of this.

> 
> So lets just add the "raw" sysfs attribute file. We can think about
> extracting some other details from the product type VDOs once the
> specification has settled down a bit and we can be quite certain that
> those details will always be available.
> 
> Would this be OK to you? I think we should be able to dump the data to
> the "raw" sysfs attribute file with something like hex_dump_to_buffer().

FWIW, "raw" option SGTM (the product type VDOs can be parsed from the
buffer since the format is fixed).

> 
> thanks,
> 
> -- 
> heikki