USB device support in wine

Damjan Jovanovic damjan.jov at gmail.com
Sat May 5 03:50:53 CDT 2007


On 5/5/07, Jon Burgess <jkburges at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > 4. Integrate NTOSKRNL.EXE into wine, add USB infrastructure to
> > NTOSKRNL.EXE so that kernel-mode drivers can access USB (probably
> > through libusb), and modify ntdll to forward the appropriate reads,
> > writes, and i/o control requests to NTOSKRNL.EXE so that the .SYS file
> > can handle them. This is the only way that works with .SYS files
> > out-of-the-box, the others all require a rewrite of the .SYS driver's
> > functionality. Architecturally, this is the best way, you wouldn't
> > need to change any code in wine to add a new driver.
> >
> > Way 4 is probably the best and I hope it works at some stage, but it's
> > still a long way off seeing as how NTOSKRNL.EXE itself still isn't in
> > wine.
>
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're saying that this approach would enable
> wine to work with (almost?) any USB device, which has a vendor specific,
> kernel-mode driver, using the vendor's supplied driver out-of-the-box.

Yes.

> Sounds like the best approach to me too.
>
> Maybe there are other people out there with the same problem as me, (or
> simply a desire to get better USB support in to wine) who would be
> interested in working on this too?

But it's a lot of work, and very few people know how to write Windows
drivers. NTOSKRNL.EXE has been around for a year or 2 now, and it
still hasn't been accepted into wine.

On a brighter note, NDISWRAPPER already works with some USB drivers,
so it can't be that hard to do.

> Jono

Damjan



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