Re: Tips on programming usb devices?

[Iain Hibbert <plunky%rya-online.net@localhost>]

On Mon, 20 Aug 2012, Brian Buhrow wrote:

>       Hello.  I'm working on a driver for the Novatel 551L USB data modem
> from Verizon.  This is a device that looks like an ethernet  port (cdce(4))
> on one interface, and a modem on another (u3g(4)).  The easiest tack strikes
> me as modifying the cdce(4) driver to attach an ucom device to itself in the
> event there is such an interface to attach to.  For the initial attempt, I
> match the device on the product and vendor IDs

>       This works fine, but what happens now is that all of the interrfaces
> on the device match the cdce(4) driver, and I get 4 instances of the driver
> running at once.  I've been trying to use the u3g.c driver as a model of
> how to configure multiple interfaces on a device, but there seem to be some
> inconsistencies about how the various usb drivers initialize themselves,
> and I'm not entirely sure I know which code does what.

The cdce driver attaches to USB "interface" directly (see files.usb, it
are at usbifif)

the u3g_init driver attaches at the USB "device" level (see files.usb, it
is at usbdevif) and claims the whole device, which then detaches and comes
back with a different personality.. but then the u3g driver only attaches
to the USB "interface" it requires.

> Can someone point me at a good code example in our tree of a driver that
> claims multiple interfaces on a usb device and maybe even at the lines
> that do the claiming?

I have written two drivers, ubt(4) and uhso(4) that both attach the whole
device and use multiple USB interfaces internally. uhso in fact provides
several com ports and a network interface so that might be more useful to
you.

uhso(4) and u3g(4) have an additional complication in that the device does
not work initially, it initially appears as a umass device and requires a
host driver (windows and macos drivers stored on the 'cd') to twiddle
something to turn it into modem mode.

> I've been successful at getting the attaches to work, but not at
> telling the config code that  I have all the interfaces for this device,
> thank you very much.

that is handled in files.usb .. when a USB device is discovered, the USB
stack first offers it to 'usbdevif' drivers as a 'device' and if no driver
claims it, offers each 'interface' individually to 'usbifif' drivers, and
any left unclaimed will appear as ugen(4)

>       For those that care, I'm basing my work on the fact that the Linux
> folks seem to have these Qualcomm Gobi based devices working by twiddling
> the modems with some python scripts before they fire up dhcp clients
> against the ethernet side of these devices.

sometimes you have to do that; the UHSO devices require some proprietary
AT commands to be sent on the control port in order to set up the network
interface but I generally just use pppd on the modem port directly since
it handles that internally.

regards,
iain