28 Feb
2013
28 Feb
'13
8:23 a.m.
On Feb 28, 2013, at 2:15 AM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:
Well, a little poking around reveals that the HG20f9
USB-to-ethernet gizmo, although it uses a Linksys VID (0x066b), isn't a Linksys
product at all.
Rather, it's a Chinese-origin device that uses the ASX88772B chip from Asix. The
0x20f9 PID doesn't appear to conflict with any existing Linksys device, so it appears
that I'll be okay by simply adding the PID/VID pair to the existing AXE driver for
OpenBSD.
Is the device not Linksys-badged? It's not terribly uncommon
for large companies (especially as large as Linksys has gotten)
to buy the design from a design house and slap their labels and
their own VID on. For example, I don't know how true it is at
this point, but at least a few years ago basically all Apple
and Microsoft USB mice were Logitech devices, including the
iMac's infamous "hockey puck" mouse (it said so on the PCB).
The VIDs were usually those of the company on the label.
I think the comp.os.bsd.tech post I linked had some useful info
regarding that for OpenBSD; in particular, there was a bugfix
the poster had to import from FreeBSD's driver to fix a PHY
problem. If you're finding communications problems, you might
want to check it (relinked in case the original got buried).
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.tech/21147
There's an interesting approach to the costly
problem of purchasing a VID license from USB-IF--just steal someone else's! Who's
gonna know?
Now why didn't I think of that?
That's a common problem with USB (and PCI, and anything else
that requires a centrally-assigned ID system). For example,
to make a USB device that pretends to be a serial port, you
need to either write drivers for everything under the sun
(especially Windows, though there are filter drivers that
make libusb work mostly like it does under Unix) or fake an
FTDI VID/PID and duplicate its command set so you don't have
to worry about distributing a driver with your thing. It
would be nice if there were more generic classes like Mass
Storage and HID, but they're sadly scarce.
- Dave