Linux LED Subsystem
2011/09/21 10 Comments
LEDs… Everyone likes that! Those little shiny electronic devices are mounted on any well-made electronic equipment to indicate at a glance its working status. They tell you when your network has activity, when your laptop battery is empty, when your hard-drive is working, when your amplifier is overloading… they may even light up your bedroom!
In embedded systems the proper design of the front panel, with the right LED illuminated icons, is an essential feature and if you are familiar with network troubleshooting you can understand why!
Well-made devices should have a panel that instantly gives you an idea of what’s working and what’s not just by looking at it.
If you are using Linux as your kernel on a SoC design, you’ll be glad to know that it has an entire subsystem dedicated to LEDs!
In this post I’ll show how you to check if your system has some controllable LEDs, and how to use that from userspace applications and kernel drivers.
fabiobaltieri 