1 Jan
2011
1 Jan
'11
12:14 a.m.
On 31/12/10 23:44, David Griffith wrote:
Some more questions that I don't see the answers
to on your page:
1) How does the Discferret present itself to the operating system? A
mass-storage device?
As a USB Vendor Class device. This translates as:
A device using a vendor-defined communications protocol not covered
by an applicable USB-IF standard.
The entire control protocol is open, but not documented yet. I'd argue
that unless you've got a really good reason not to, you're better off
using the reference API implementation (libdiscferret).
2) How does the user control the various aspects of
the Discferret, like
what format to use, side to use, which drive to use, etc?
You use the libdiscferret user-space API. On Linux, this doesn't require
any kernel drivers be installed, though you will need LibUSB 1.0 (which
is included in almost all recent Linux distributions). On Windows 32-
and 64-bit, you need to install a driver called "libusb0" which grants
LibUSB access to the device.
There's a libusb-1.0 port for Darwin (Mac OS X) too, though I'm not sure
about other OSes. Libusb-0.1 has wider cross platform support, though
it's classed as "legacy, deprecated" and as such I'm not too keen on the
idea of using it.
However, I'm still fairly early on in the development of the
libdiscferret library, so it could be ported to libusb-0.1 if necessary.
The only OSes unsupported by libusb-1.0 are FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD
-- does anyone here need BSD support?
Thanks,
--
Phil.
classiccmp at philpem.me.uk
http://www.philpem.me.uk/