USB-port powering & CEC support

[gonzo]

Thank you! Hm so it is still unknown until somebody can test it? The device from preprodution you mean... do you think it was able to power the USB2 ports separately from each other or does gpio2 low mean, that both ports will go down. i was not able to guess is... sorry

Well, it didn't work for me when I tried just then, but I haven't tracked it down through the DTS to see if the sysfs IO is even hooked up properly, or is overridden by something else.

The two USB2 ports don't appear to be independently controlled. They have independent current limiters, but the enable pins are tied together, and then hooked up to GPIO0_A2. So when it does work, it'll be a USB2 ports on or USB2 ports off affair. Because the USB3 port is always on, and you mentioned AC wireless, I'd be plugging that into the USB3 port, and then a HDD into one of the USB2 ports (probably the bottom one, I avoid USBOTG ports when any performance is needed as they tend to be slower unless they can be bypassed properly). Then you'd get the on/off functionality you want... unless you need the second USB2 port for something else that you would want to stay on... once somebody works out why it isn't working atm, of course

Hi pfeerick, at all thats sounds really good and seems to be very close to the things i want to do. In order to achieve filetranser over the air with (n-draft or) ac -wifi the USB 3.0 port is the only option. And as you said always on status of the USB 3.0 is made for this wifi-dongle setup. I would buy either this https://goo.gl/DSyZ8w antenna for n-draft or this https://goo.gl/tFsyhH for ac-wifi because i' ve read that they are well supported with linux distributions on arm architecture, too.
For backup cases i am not in a rush, so there's enough time for doing backups  or download all the stuff via USB 2.0 ports maybe with a transfering rate up to 38-40 MB/s because the rock64 runs 24 hours a day. This speed should be also good enough for watching 4k videos from USB-drive. And for now i have no plans to connect another device to the left USB OTG port, so i don't care if the USB2 ports don't have the ability to get powered indepentently. To sum up and hopefully for my correct understanding (please correct me if i'm wrong): you have successfully tested USB2 power off / power on functionality?
And if i don't care if or when the USB3 powering option will be supported at any time in the future or not, and the same for the USB 2 working independent power off / power on
functionality then i can order the board for my planned usage?  (the on demand access to usb i want to realize with a bunch of scripts depending on the activity: watching videos, starting downloads, back up tasks and as said afterwards i with to power off the hard drive) Regearding the CEC topic...i hope that upcoming libre elec support is connected with support on more "open" linux distributions like debian or arch soon, too.

Again thanks a lot for your support!