USB Device Support

[Tom Spear]

Now that I think about it, I have a webcam which the last supported windows
version was XP. I'm not using it for anything since I have another one which
is supported in 7 and linux, but I don't know if it's picked up in linux
either. I could send it your way too tho.

Thanks

Tom


On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 8:54 AM, Tom Spear <speeddymon at gmail.com> wrote:

> I have a USB pedometer that uploads the data to the internet. I could get
> another one and the driver software for you to play with. You have to be a
> registered member for a monthly fee to get one otherwise, but my job
> sponsors anyone that wants to get/stay in shape that works for them, so
> getting an extra pedometer is fine by me. I have been hoping for an
> opportunity to mention that it doesn't work, and this seems like as good as
> any. :-)
>
> Thanks
>
> Tom
>
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 5:03 AM, Damjan Jovanovic <damjan.jov at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 1:39 AM, Eric Durbin <eadurbin at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> > On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 10:48 AM, Damjan Jovanovic <
>> damjan.jov at gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >>
>> >> When last I heard from Alexander Morozov (October 2009), he wasn't
>> >> working on those patches much, and had no interest in sending them to
>> >> wine-patches.
>> >>
>> >> I did some work on USB since then, and sent some patches starting from
>> >> around March 2010 (too many attempts to list, search for them). Most
>> >> were rejected.
>> >>
>> >> The USB story goes as follows:
>> >>
>> >> My libusb patch was rejected IIRC because the libusb situation was
>> >> unclear. There's the old libusb-0.1 and the new more powerful
>> >> libusb-1.0. IIRC each *nix hacked up its own specific variation of
>> >> libusb that had to be detected specifically, and some *nixes didn't
>> >> support the libusb-1.0 interface yet (libusb-1.0 itself only supports
>> >> Linux and MacOS when last I checked, and they were doing a Windows
>> >> port).
>> >>
>> >> The ntoskrnl that Wine currently emulates is total bogus: one process
>> >> per driver, drivers all in separate processes from each other. On
>> >> Windows there's a single address space for all drivers and they can
>> >> communicate amongst themselves. I don't think inter-driver
>> >> communication is that crucial initially, but it will be eventually
>> >> (eg. last I heard, the iPod driver stacks on top of USBSTOR.SYS, and
>> >> multi-function USB devices can use a different driver for each
>> >> interface - these may communicate among themselves with private ioctl
>> >> requests). The big problem with the multi process situation is
>> >> hardware sharing: how do you set it up so each driver accesses its own
>> >> and only its own hardware?
>> >>
>> >> Drivers either start on system startup (Wine starts those with the
>> >> first process that starts), or get loaded on-demand as the hardware is
>> >> plugged in. Most drivers should install themselves to be loaded
>> >> on-demand. Who loads those and how?
>> >>
>> >> Windows uses USBHUB.SYS to do device I/O and load drivers on demand.
>> >> Alexandre didn't want that dll because it exports nothing (all its
>> >> features are accessible via internal ioctls), and suggested adding the
>> >> features to USBD.SYS instead, which we already have and which has
>> >> exports. Now USBD.SYS is linked to by most (but not all) USB drivers
>> >> so (most of the time) it automatically gets loaded into each one -
>> >> great right? - but it has no idea which driver it got loaded with, nor
>> >> a straightforward way to determine which device(s!) that driver wants
>> >> to drive. Also, since most drivers only load on-demand, the driver
>> >> will never load, and thus this won't work unless we load those drivers
>> >> on startup instead. The other approach, which I tried, was to get
>> >> Wine's mountmgr.sys to detect USB devices using HAL, then pass them to
>> >> a loaded-on-startup instance of USBHUB.SYS using a Wine-private ioctl,
>> >> which would detect the driver for the device and launch a new instance
>> >> of itself that would make a device object and load the driver to
>> >> attach to it. This was all a bit a hack (USBHUB.SYS uses environment
>> >> variables to tell the child which device and driver to run) and
>> >> Alexandre also didn't the the Wine-private ioctls. Alexander Morozov's
>> >> patch did things the Windows way: all drivers in one ntoskrnl process
>> >> - this won't work properly in Wine for years, if ever, since ntoskrnl
>> >> is so incomplete and one bad driver will crash them all. Another
>> >> possibility could be to keep drivers in separate processes, but allow
>> >> inter-process communication, but I see serializing IRPs between
>> >> processes as being complex and very slow.
>> >>
>> >> Driver installation is also quite a mission. Windows detects that the
>> >> hardware doesn't have a driver installed, and then generates the
>> >> device ID and compatible IDs and searches .INF files for one that can
>> >> support it. Our setupapi needs to be substantially improved to be able
>> >> to do the same, and some newdev.dll and manual INF parsing work to
>> >> install the driver may also be necessary, and I can already think of
>> >> cases where even class installers will be necessary too :-(.
>> >>
>> >> Wine only sends DeviceIoControl to drivers. For anything non-trivial,
>> >> other file-related user-space functions (at least ReadFile, WriteFile)
>> >> need to go to the driver too. The infrastructure for this does not
>> >> even exist yet, and would probably affects wineserver as well.
>> >>
>> >> Regression tests for ntosnkrl.exe and kernel drivers don't exist, and
>> >> are difficult to come up with, since we'd have to compile and load
>> >> drivers on Windows and run tests that don't crash Windows :-).
>> >>
>> >> So the architecture for USB support is tricky to say the least. But
>> >> I'd still like to resume work on my USB patches some time soon, would
>> >> you like to help?
>> >
>> > I'd be willing to help if you want some assistance. I don't know much
>> about
>> > the subject yet, but I'm reading  programming the wdm atm.
>>
>> Firstly I'd like to find a cheap simple USB device that we can
>> actually get working quickly. Earlier I was experimenting with my
>> Blackberry driver, but that's not going far quickly, since it's a
>> multi-protocol device (modem, mass storage, and proprietary protocols,
>> etc.). I've got a USB scanner that's unsupported by SANE, but that
>> needs ReadFile/WriteFile which is a lot of work by itself. Same with
>> USB flash sticks. I can get hold of an iPod but that's probably the
>> most complex, needing to stack on top of USBSTOR.SYS IIRC. Ironically
>> drivers for the easy hardware (USB mice) are unnecessary anyway, since
>> the Linux drivers are good enough, and the Windows drivers probably
>> need to be driven from user-space by bits Wine doesn't have. Maybe I
>> should give up and just get something partially working, add the rest
>> later gradually. Any ideas?
>>
>> Then it's largely a matter of design. I think Alexandre's idea
>> (process per driver, host all USB code in USBD.SYS) is good enough
>> initially.
>>
>> Essentially the first steps would be:
>> 1. libusb integration
>> 2. driver loading hacks
>> 3. driver -> devices lookup
>> 4. usb bus enumeration for devices
>> 5. create pdo and fdo for each device
>> 6. AddDevice to driver
>> 7. perform I/O for IRPs coming down from the driver using libusb I/O
>> functions
>>
>> That should get a very basic driver (that only uses the control pipe)
>> working. I'll try to get some of this done later this week/weekend.
>>
>> Damjan
>>
>>
>>
>
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