What is anchor? =============== A USB driver needs to support some callbacks requiring a driver to cease all IO to an interface. To do so, a driver has to keep track of the URBs it has submitted to know they've all completed or to call usb_kill_urb for them. The anchor is a data structure takes care of keeping track of URBs and provides methods to deal with multiple URBs. Allocation and Initialisation ============================= There's no API to allocate an anchor. It is simply declared as struct usb_anchor. init_usb_anchor() must be called to initialise the data structure. Deallocation ============ Once it has no more URBs associated with it, the anchor can be freed with normal memory management operations. Association and disassociation of URBs with anchors =================================================== An association of URBs to an anchor is made by an explicit call to usb_anchor_urb(). The association is maintained until an URB is finished by (successfull) completion. Thus disassociation is automatic. A function is provided to forcibly finish (kill) all URBs associated with an anchor. Furthermore, disassociation can be made with usb_unanchor_urb() Operations on multitudes of URBs ================================ usb_kill_anchored_urbs() ------------------------ This function kills all URBs associated with an anchor. The URBs are called in the reverse temporal order they were submitted. This way no data can be reordered. usb_wait_anchor_empty_timeout() ------------------------------- This function waits for all URBs associated with an anchor to finish or a timeout, whichever comes first. Its return value will tell you whether the timeout was reached.