A USB hub is responsible for the following:
Monitoring the insertion or removal of a device on its ports
Power managing individual devices on its ports
Controlling power to its ports
The USB host controller has an embedded hub called the root hub. The ports that are visible at the system's back panel are the ports of the root hub. The USB host controller is responsible for the following:
Directing the USB bus. Individual devices cannot arbitrate for the bus.
Polling the devices by using a polling interval that is determined by the device. The device is assumed to have sufficient buffering to account for the time between the polls.
Sending data between the USB host controller and its attached devices. Peer-to-peer communication is not supported.
Do not cascade hubs beyond four levels on either SPARC based systems or x86 based systems. On SPARC systems, the OpenBoot PROM cannot reliably probe beyond four levels of devices.
Do not plug a bus-powered hub into another bus-powered hub in a cascading style. A bus-powered hub does not have its own power supply.
Do not connect a device that requires a large amount of power to a bus-powered hub. These devices might be denied connection to bus-powered hubs or might drain the hub of power for other devices. An example of such a device is a USB diskette device.
Suspending and resuming USB devices is fully supported on SPARC systems. However, do not suspend a device that is busy and never remove a device when the system is powered off under a suspend shutdown.
The USB framework makes a best effort to power manage all devices on SPARC based systems with power management enabled. Power managing a USB device means that the hub driver suspends the port to which the device is connected. Devices that support remote wake up can notify the system to wake up everything in the device's path so that the device can be used. The host system could also wake up the device if an application sends an I/O to the device.
All HID devices (keyboard, mouse, hub, and storage devices), hub devices, and storage devices are power managed by default if they support remote wake-up capability. A USB printer is power managed only between two print jobs. Devices that are managed by the generic USB driver (UGEN) are power managed only when they are closed.
When power management is running to reduce power consumption, USB leaf devices are powered down first. After all devices that are connected to a hub's ports are powered down, the hub is powered down after some delay. To achieve the most efficient power management, do not cascade many hubs.
For information about using the SUSPEND/SHUTDOWN key on SPARC systems, see USB Keyboards and Mouse Devices.