uhubctl is utility to control USB power per-port on smart USB hubs. Smart hub is defined as one that implements per-port power switching.

Original idea for this code was inspired by hub-ctrl.c by Niibe Yutaka: https://www.gniibe.org/development/ac-power-control-by-USB-hub

Note that very few hubs actually support per-port power switching. Some of them are no longer manufactured and can be hard to find.

This is list of known compatible USB hubs:

This table is by no means complete. If your hub works with uhubctl, but is not listed above, please report it by opening new issue at https://github.com/mvp/uhubctl/issues, so we can add it to supported table. In your report, please provide exact product model and add output from uhubctl.

Note that quite a few modern motherboards have built-in root hubs that do support this feature - you may not even need to buy any external hub. WARNING: turning off built-in USB ports may cut off your keyboard or mouse, so be careful what ports you are turning off!

If you have USB 3.0 hub connected to USB3 upstream port, it will be detected as 2 independent virtual hubs: USB2 and USB3, and your USB devices will be connected to USB2 or USB3 virtual hub depending on their capabilities and connection speed. To control power for such hubs, it is necessary to turn off/on power on both USB2 and USB3 virtual hubs for power off/on changes to take effect. uhubctl will try to do this automatically (unless you disable this behavior with option -e).

Unfortunately, while most hubs will cut off data USB connection, some may still not cut off VBUS to port, which means connected phone may still continue to charge from port that is powered off by uhubctl.

This utility was tested to compile and work on Linux (Ubuntu/Debian, Redhat/Fedora/CentOS, Arch Linux, Gentoo, openSUSE, Buildroot), FreeBSD and Mac OS X.

While uhubctl compiles on Windows, USB power switching does not work on Windows because libusb is using winusb.sys driver, which according to Microsoft does not support necessary USB control requests. This may be fixed if libusb starts supporting different driver on Windows.

First, you need to install library libusb-1.0 (version 1.0.12 or later):

• Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0-dev
• Redhat: sudo yum install libusb1-devel
• MacOSX: brew install libusb, or sudo port install libusb-devel
• FreeBSD: libusb is included by default
• Windows: TBD?

To compile, simply run make - this will generate uhubctl binary.

Also, for Mac OS X you can install uhubctl with Homebrew custom tap:

brew tap mvp/uhubctl https://github.com/mvp/uhubctl
brew install --HEAD uhubctl

You can control the power on a USB port(s) like this:

uhubctl -a off -p 2

This means operate on default smart hub and turn power off (-a off, or -a 0) on port 2 (-p 2). Supported actions are off/on/cycle (or 0/1/2). cycle means turn power off, wait some delay (configurable with -d) and turn it back on.

On Linux, you may need to run it with sudo, or to configure udev USB permissions.

If you have more than one smart USB hub connected, you should choose specific hub to control using -l (location) parameter. To find hub locations, simply run uhubctl without any parameters. Hub locations look like b-x.y.z, where b is USB bus number, and x, y, z... are port numbers for all hubs in chain, starting from root hub for a given USB bus. This address is semi-stable - it will not change if you unplug/replug (or turn off/on) USB device into the same physical USB port (this method is also used in Linux kernel).

Copyright (C) 2009-2018 Vadim Mikhailov

This file can be distributed under the terms and conditions of the GNU General Public License version 2.