I need to display the status of the ethernet connection (eth0) on the GUI, i.e. is the link up or not.
I have a Davicom DM9000 PHY.
I know there are various ways to skin this cat, like parsing ifconfig, polling /sys/class/net/eth0/operstate, etc.
However, as I will need to monitor other devices also, like USB, I would like to use libudev for this as a more generic implementation.
Furthermore, I would like to use the monitor mechanism (using a select() ) and in doing so prevent having to poll.
I have wrapped the libudev functionality in a Qt class and intend on using signal/slot mechanisms to indicate events to my program.
Problem is, I can't seem to generate UDEV events from eth0 no matter what.
I have also tried using
udevadm monitor
but no events either when unplugging my ethernet cable.
I don't think my code is too far off, because I am able to generate events for USB (hidraw) devices by unplugging my keyboard, for example.
Also, I am able to see eth0's attributes using the libudev enumerate mechanism (but this is a polling process)
My question - is this possible, i.e. to use libudev's udev_monitor functions to catch events on eth0?
Sorry for the long post.
Have already looked at D-bus? Via D-Bus and underlying services you can get all the info you need. See this a little bit outdated article to understand the concept. See Qt/D-Bus documentation.
Related
My question is simple, is there a way to see in a terminal what usb devices do I have connected to my computer in real time?
I already know lsusb, but it just show me the devices on the moment I ask it, I would like to be able to see if one connects and disconects at some point.
Edit: Thought the answer marked underneath gives a good alternative, in order to debug the program I was working on I found usefull useing the C++ function
std::system("lsusb");
This way I could check if I had lost or not the USB device.
Sure there is, you can use the udev device manager for kernel.
Moreover you can define rules to detect plugged/unplugged devices you are interested e.g. in your case usb devices.
Here is a tutorial on how to write a udev rule
I want to scan the signal strength received from 3 AP.
I would be happy if that could happen every 300ms (max.500ms). I flashed OpenWRT on the routers.
I was seeking for a good tool to do that.
First I found iwconfig which worked, but only with networks that I was connected to. So I used iwlist (iw didn't work- maybe I need to update it?). Do you know how accurate is the output of it? Can I trust it?
After that, I came across the IOCTL. It looks really powerful* and professional. But is the output from getting the signal stregnth from a WIFI more reliable than the simple method like iwlist/iw?
*even too much powerful as I failed to compile any program I wrote using it
If you want to determine the signal strength of WLAN access points to which you are not connected, scanning is the right way.
The scanning is performed by the wireless network card with much or little "help" from the driver, depending on the design of the wireless card. There are cards (chipsets, to be more specific) that have their own processor and run their own firmware code independently from the host computer. On the other end, there are "stupid" cards where the driver on the host computer does most of the work.
Between the driver and the rest of the operating system, there is an interface (API) for sending commands to the driver and reading back information in a standardized way. With Linux, there are at least two different APIs. The older one is named Wireless Extensions, and the newer one is named cfg80211. Normally, a driver supports only one of the APIs. Most current drivers use cfg80211, but there may be older drivers that still use Wireless Extensions.
For each of the two APIs, there's a user-space tool (or family of tools) to use it. For Wireless Extensions, there is iwconfig (and iwlist, iwpriv etc.) For cfg80211, there is just iw.
So, the questions about the right tool depends on what API the wireless driver uses. To add confusion ;-), cfg80211 does some emulation which allows you to perform some Wireless Extension calls to drivers that use the newer cfg80211 API.
Regarding your questions about ioctl(): This is a generic method for communication between user-space and kernel-space in Unix operating systems. The old Wireless Extensions API uses ioctl(). The newer cfg80211 API does not use an ioctl()-based interface, but uses nl80211 instead.
To sum it up: whether to use iw/cfg80211/nl80211 or iwconfig/Wireless Extensions/ioctl depends on the driver or your wireless card.
Regarding your desired scanning interval, I would say that 300ms is rather short. This is because for a useful scan, the client needs to leave its current channel for a short time, switch to another channel and listen to signals from other access points on this channel. Since leaving its channel interrupts communication, these off-channel times are usually kept short and are carried out infrequently.
Calling iw <dev> scan or iwlist <dev> scan, respectively, will not necessarily cause a new scan, but may return an old (cached) list of access points. Depending on your wireless card/driver it may be (im)possible to enforce a new scan.
for Linux, there is a nifty little library called xbindkeys that (surprise) binds commands of your choice to certain key combinations.
I am looking for something similar, except for a system hardware event. When I plug in my headphones to the output jack on my computer, I would like to be able to call a program. It would also be nice to be able to bind to the event when I un-plug my headphones.
Does anybody know if this is possible? Maybe through some cool Python X11 library?
Thanks in advance.
EDIT: Found the API for the jack abstraction layer: http://www.alsa-project.org/~tiwai/alsa-driver-api/ch06s02.html
Sadly, this only allows for polling of the device, not an event handler.
You probably want to use udev for this. I haven't used libudev, but here's something I found:
libudev - Monitoring Interface
libudev also provides a monitoring interface. The monitoring interface
will report events to the application when the status of a device
changes. This is useful for receiving notification when devices are
connected or disconnected from the system.
The actions are returned as the following strings:
add - Device is connected to the system
remove - Device is disconnected from the system
change - Something about the device changed
move - Device node was moved, renamed, or re-parented
That article goes on to show how it obtains a file descriptor via udev_monitor_get_fd, which it later monitors via select.
Most modern Linux desktops (notably Gnome and KDE) use "DBus".
DBus, in turn, utilizes HAL (older) and/or udev (newer).
Here are a couple of links that explain further:
https://www.linux.com/news/hardware/peripherals/180950-udev
http://w3.linux-magazine.com/issue/71/Dynamic_Device_Management_in%20Udev.pdf
http://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-tutorial.html
Is it possible to make a computer behave as a bluetooth HID device? That is, given a local machine with a standard USB keyboard plugged into it, other devices could discover this machine and use it as a bluetooth keyboard.
I'd like to create a linux or OS X application (or use an existing one, though I've found none) which can behave as described above, but I'm not sure where to start, or if it's even possible.
So:
Is what I'm describing possible?
Are there any existing applications that do what I describe?
If no application already exists (I'm assuming not), are there bluetooth libraries or bindings that will help? (I'm pretty comfortable using most of today's popular languages, so I'd prefer a library most directly suited to the task, so long as it's available in linux or OS X.)
Failing any of the above, the bluetooth spec looks pretty dense. Are there specific guides or other starting points applicable to the problem at hand that I can read?
I realize that such an application would most likely need to steal the normal keyboard input, possibly providing some KVM-like hotkey for switching between providing input to the host operating system and sending the input over bluetooth to the connected device, but I'm considering that problem to be outside the scope of this question.
It is definitely possible on Linux. Some time ago I found this project:
http://nohands.sourceforge.net/index.html
They emulate a full-blown headset with audio and keyboard controls on the Linux bluetooth stack. If they can emulate something like that, you would probably be able to emulate something simpler like a keyboard.
It is possible, however I don't think I'll be able explain it very well and I don't know the entire answer. A BT HID device works as a server and waits for connections to come to it. In linux, using the bluez stack, first you would have to advertise the HID service for other devices to see. I think you do that using the sdp.h and sdp-lib.h header files(the second header maybe called something else, I'm on a windows computer and can't check). So you would have to add the HID service record to you computer for other devices to see it. You would have to create a program that first adds this service to the record, then waits for other devices to connect, then handle the pairing process, Bluez might handle this for you, or you might have to do some things to it, I'm not quite sure. You should also read the Bluetooth HID Spec found at the http://www.bluetooth.com/English/Technology/Building/Pages/Specification.aspx site. This document contains the details of the SDP record relevant to HID. Also the book Bluetooth essentials for programmers is pretty good to introduce you into bluetooth programming
I would like to have given a more concise answer, with more detail, but that's all I know ATM. I am also trying do something similar, but spare time is so hard to find ;) I'm also not on my Linux box and can't check all the details. If your are still interested, let me know and i'll try to expand my answer.
I don't know if this is helpful, nor if it is still alive and working, but perhaps you could try this link.
Another one that might or might not be helpful in some way is remuco, but I don't know if they are using a Bluetooth HID profile.
It is indeed entirely possible with Linux and Bluez. See: https://github.com/lkundrak/virtkbd/blob/master/btkbdd.pod
Try Across, unfortuantly for me my phone was lacking support.
I have a question regardind dbus on the current(2.6.35) kernel. Is dbus a way of communication between kernel and user space? I can figure it out by myself. For exemple if you make use of the usb driver(inserting something like a usb flash pen) and monitoring the activity of the dbus(dbus-monitor) the answer might be yes. But in the source code(usb-skeleton.c and the driver for gadgets there's no sign of dbus). Dbus.h is not to be found in the kernel tree.
Thank you very much. Sorry if i've got this wrong but i am kind of a noob on device drivers and dbus!
D-Bus is for user space applications to communicate with one another.
If you want to communicate with a device driver you want to use either IOCTLs, netlink or create a new syscall. I've created netlink code in the past to speak to a special networking card, and it was relatively easy to do. Using the ioctl is also quite easy but you are limited by how much information you can/should pass via it.
If you are curious how dbus relates to a USB device being inserted, I think it is something like this:
D-Bus (or "daemon bus") is a means of communication between processes (inter-process communication or IPC for short) on Linux/Unix based systems.
It lets processes expose a "D-Bus service" with methods that clients can call. These methods usually map to real methods written in some programming language. D-Bus is language-independent, but most toolkits have some library to make it easier to use - e.g. QtDbus.
It is in no way related to the kernel or drivers, but of course no one prevents a driver from also having a D-Bus service if they want to. (This could be useful in some cases.)