1 Jan
2011
1 Jan
'11
3:53 a.m.
On Sat, 1 Jan 2011, Philip Pemberton wrote:
*BSD have partial implementations of libusb. I think it would be best if
the control software is implemented as a FUSE sitting atop libusb. We
could then work around missing portions of libusb on *BSD to get support
there.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
On 31/12/10 23:44, David Griffith wrote:
So, as it is now, you cannot directly mount a disk? See below for more
ruminations on the subject.
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?