USB Todo's

USB on OS/2 and eCS

There are several efforts working on USB related issues for OS/2. Most of the work is based on IBM's USB stack which is unfortunately not always the best known solution because it is based on official standards. For sure Microsoft did it different so many devices are not recognized correctly on OS/2 or eCS. IBM itself seems not to be interested in following the Microsoft way, which makes the USB stack useless for quite some devices.

Several people started to release their own version of the drivers, always based on the original work of IBM. This page tries to gather the different efforts, the goal is to have some kind of netlabs.org USB release which should become the most compatible one with current devices.

Discussion

All discussions take place on the usb-dev@netlabs.org mailinglist, you can read the archive online as well:

• http://news.gmane.org/gmane.org.netlabs.usb.devel/cutoff=5

There are many other ways to read and post in this mailinglist, please check the Mailinglists page for more information.

Ideas

USB driver

At the moment there are several different USB drivers available, each one supports some features more or less:

• CW-USBMSD, the driver from Chris Wohlgemuth. Supports more devices than the IBM one, especially Archos Jukebox and other external hard disks.
• USBD.SYS included in MMPORT by Martin Kiewitz. This driver implements the enumeration of devices like Windows does so it should be more compatible with devices than the original one by IBM.
• USBMSD13b by Yuri Dario. Supports Olympus digital cameras.

PM/WPS integration

Jason Stefanovich posted some pretty good ideas in a posting to the usb-dev Mailinglist. The archive of the message is not online at the moment, will be fixed soon. One should write a summary about his ideas here. You are welcome to contribute :)

Christian Langanke and Markus Montkowski had some good ideas as well. Please summarize here guys.

There's a daemon package called USBMOUNT on Hobbes for automatically mounting USB disks. It uses USBRES to monitor for new devices and runs rediscoverdrives.exe (or however it's called) after attaching of a USB device. Source code is included. This package may be easily extended to support cameras and other stuff. With a REXX interface user written REXX procedures may be executed on every mount.

• status reports should pop up in xCenter a bit like what we have on Windows

REXX

Martin Kiewitz implemented some REXX wrappers in his MMPORT package. This could be used as a base for other REXX wrappers.

AFAIK there are other wrappers as well but I don't know details. Please extend if you know more.

Java interfaces on OS/2 and eCS

Christoph Bratschi had some nice ideas for a Java-USB interface on OS/2 based on the proposal by IBM. Please add more information and links here Christoph.

IBM's "proposal" is JSR-080, inhabiting the javax.usb namespace. Final approval ballot for this proposed specification ends on December 20th, 2004, at which time the proposal is expected to become a finalized standard.

This library is also in use by the JSyncManager. So long as the implementation is sufficiently complete to detect the addition and removal of USB devices, the configuration of devices, the aquisition of the interface endpoints, and the tools to do bulk transport communications, it will permit USB-dock based PalmOS handhelds to sync on OS/2.

USB Resource Manager

Written by Markus Montkowski it needs some refresh. Add your requests/ideas here. As it is/was written using sybil the sources are not in the netlabs CVS. The current Ideas for a replacement are:

• Enhance the USB res driver to report usbhubs.
• Check hub ports if unused/or if a hub is attached to it to detect hub de/attachmement
• General Hotplug demon with DLLs for the supported busses (USB/IR/Bluetooth/PCMCIA/Firewire)

The demon loads the bus DLLs and starts notification threads for each bus.
When a new device is attached the DLL returns a uniqe name for the device f.i. in the form of
BUS:NR:V-VENDORID:D-DEVICEID:SERIAL.
The demon looks up if a WPS object with the Name exists and if notifies it.
If not it creates an object for it in the folder of it's bus.

• General Hotplug-Bus WPS Class

Each Hostdriver gets represented as an WPS Object as it implements. 
With optional statistics pages.

• General Hotplug WPS Device Class

Gives info about the device in properties : BUS, BUS ID etc.
Allows addion of Programobject for Plug/Unplug events.
Shows BUS spec. Property pages implemented by the BUS-DLLs.

GENMAC and USB devices

Willibald Meyer wrote a generic wrapper to use NDIS drivers of Windows 2000 or higher on OS/2. It would be possible to extend this driver for USB NIC drivers as well.

Please list the required enhancements here.

Requirements for GENMAC driver interface to XWLAN

• set/query connection settings (SSID, type of network, etc)
• set/query encrpytion settings (WEP/WPA)
• query signal and status from driver
• query TCP/IP interface bound to a driver instance

See src\lib\drvapi\drvacces.* of xwlan source for current implementation by genprism driver