I am looking at implementing USB communication on a MCU which has a USB engine built into it. Basically you have access to the pipes/endpoints.
I am a little bit confused on the USB stack now. It appears that drivers operate on another level above the pipe/endpoint setup, so the pipe/endpoint is like a middle level layer that drivers are built on. Is this correct?
Secondly, I am interested in simulating serial communication over USB. It appears windows has a premade driver so on the computer side I do not need to program the pipe level.
How do I find out what I need to implement on the MCU to make it behave correctly with the generic serial driver?
This is an answer to your second question regarding the serial communication.
The USB standard defines a communication device class (CDC) for serial communication. The required drivers on the host side are implemented by Windows, macOS, Linux and many more operation systems.
The relevant CDC subclass is PSTN. The relevant documents are found in Class definition for Communication Devices 1.2.
The device basically implements four endpoints:
Control endpoint for configuration requests (baud rate, DTR state etc.). Have a look at SetLineCodeing, GetLineCoding and SetControlLineState.
Bulk endpoint for USB to serial transmission
Bulk endpoint for serial to USB transmission
Interrupt endpoint for notifications (DCD state, errors). See SerialState.
And of course you need to get the device descriptor right.
On top of that, you need to implement all the standard USB requests.
Chances are high that this has already been written for your MCU, both the standard requests and the serial communication. So why not use the existing code?
Related
I am trying to talk to a MSC USB device (interface class 8, subclass 6, protocol 0x50) via a plain USB API with endpoints (all set up for me).
Provided I have a valid CDB, such as for "Test Unit Ready", how to I send that over the USB interface?
Where can I find examples or docs for how this is done?
Background: The actual platform is macOS, which doesn't provide SCSI-passthrough for block devices, and the native SCSI API is also not available in this case.
I have, however, been able to initiate communication on the USB level with the device, and am now trying to circumvent the blocked SCSI device level access by talking thru USB directly.
Most such devices implement the so-called “Bulk Only” protocol, which is specified here: https://usb.org/document-library/mass-storage-bulk-only-10
Essentially, you send a 31-byte “Command Block Wrapper”, which includes the CDB and is specified in section 5.1 of the spec, to the device via the bulk out endpoint. You then read or write the data to be transferred from the input bulk endpoint or to the output bulk endpoint and finally read the 13-byte command status wrapper from the bulk in pipe.
However, note that you’ll need to make sure the OS hasn’t already loaded a driver for the device - from user space, the system won’t give you access to the endpoints when a kernel driver has claimed them anyway, but if you were to attempt to use the same pipes as the default driver from a kext, you’d get unpredictable results.
Will USB communication in Windows 10 be done in Bulk mode?
I'm in the process of selecting a PC and would like to know how to transfer Windows 10 to other devices for USB communication.
There are four transfer methods for USB communication, Control, Interrupt, Bulk, and Isochronous, and which one is used depends on the host.
I'm hoping to use the Bulk method of communication because I don't want USB communication without retransmission.
Thank you!
and which one is used depends on the host
Yes and no. The host must use the method appropriate for a device, and the device has endpoint descriptors which define whether an endpoint is bulk,interrupt or isochronous.
Note that common devices have specific endpoint type requirements: Mass storage use bulk while HID devices (e.g. mice or keyboards) use interrupt ep.
First allow me to say that I don't have any experience developing drivers for OSX, nor drivers for Windows. So, there are a lot of things that I don't understand about how drivers work; I'm sure it'll be evident in my question.
I have a modem that is able to open and close TCP/UDP sockets using AT commands. I would like to create some kind of program (kernel extension? driver?) that implements a network driver, converting the network interface calls into AT command serial messages.
That's the basic jist of it. I'm essentially asking if anybody can point me in the right direction / give me a high level overview of how they would approach it and what Apple guides to focus on.
The XNU networking stack -- like most network stacks -- expects network devices to send and receive IP packets directly. It isn't tooled to work with network devices that handle part of the network stack (like TCP or UDP) internally -- it won't be possible to implement a network driver which uses this device.
You might have more luck exposing this device as a SOCKS proxy. You will need to write a userspace daemon which listens on a TCP port on localhost (on the computer) and relays traffic to the serial device; once that's done, you can set the computer to use that device as a SOCKS proxy in the Networking control panel.
(As an aside: most devices that implement this type of interface have a very low limit on the number of open sockets -- often fewer than 10. They're unlikely to be able to handle the network load generated by a desktop OS.)
I just want to know how to find a usb device is connected to USB3.0 or USB2.0 port in window . I am using c++ and win32 API. please let me know your thoughts.
Based on how your question is phrased, I assume that you know when a device is connected, and need to know if the port it's connected is capable of USB 3.0 speeds.
Take a look at the USB_NODE_CONNECTION_INFORMATION_EX structure, and specifically the field Speed in it, which could correspond to a value defined in the enum USB_DEVICE_SPEED. For USB 3.0, the value of Speed would be UsbSuperSpeed.
The documentation page says that you could use IOCTL_USB_GET_NODE_CONNECTION_INFORMATION_EX request to obtain information about the connection associated with the indicated USB port.
You may also find the following remarks from the documentation helpful:
If there is no device connected, IOCTL_USB_GET_NODE_CONNECTION_INFORMATION_EX just returns information about the port.
If a device is connected to the port IOCTL_USB_GET_NODE_CONNECTION_INFORMATION_EX returns information about both the port and the connected device.
The USB_NODE_CONNECTION_INFORMATION_EX structure is an extended version of USB_NODE_CONNECTION_INFORMATION. The two structures are identical, except for one member. In the extended structure, the Speed member indicates the device speed.
I'd also encourage you to single-step through the usbview project which is part of the windows driver samples available in Github.
I need to create a Cocoa app that will create a virtual serial port available to other apps, meaning registered in the IO Kit Registry.
Gist of the app:
Create a virtual serial port (listed in /dev and registered with the IOKit Registry)
Initiate a tcp connection out to another computer
Proxy everything received on the virtual serial port out to the
network and vice versa.
This app will be used by third party apps that talk to serial ports on the computer, allowing for the particular serial device to be located across the network. The Cocoa and network part is no problem, I've written several apps that talk over the network. My hangup is the serial port.
I've done the test with socat/netcat/minicom to verify that it all works to proxy pty/tty traffic over the network but the tty I use doesn't show up as usable by random applications because it's not registered in the IO Kit Registry.
While I can use a pty/tty master/slave for the communication, I need this slave tty to show up to Mac applications. What would be very handy is a way to register a tty in the IO Kit Registry.
Do I really need to create a custom IOKit kext driver that gets registered at Cocoa app runtime? If so, I have a big learning curve ahead of me. Where should I start reading? Or, can I use IOKit to create a virtual serial port and register it as a usable serial port for applications without having to load any kernel extensions?
Thank you for any help you can provide,
Stateful
First of all, have you checked if you can borrow a solution from this app? It's not obvious from the website if they've managed to get their virtual serial ports fully integrated into the system.
If there is a way to do it from user space, I'm not aware of it. The user-space IOKit API generally doesn't let you create class instances, let alone new device driver classes. Maybe you can somehow otherwise persuade the Cocoa libraries to find it despite not being registered in the kernel.
I don't know if you could get away with creating a "dummy" serial port in the kernel and then move your tty into its place in /dev from your userspace daemon. Maybe that's an option.
In case you do have to do it all in the kernel:
The virtual driver itself shouldn't be too much work, at least, though it will require some time to get up to speed with kernel dev. Unfortunately, the documentation is pretty thin for serial port drivers - the key is subclassing the IOSerialDriverSync abstract class. Just about the only description I've seen is in Ole Henry Halvorsen's OSX and iOS Kernel Programming book. It also has a fragment of an example for the reading & writing operations. (disclosure: I was one of the tech reviewers for this book; I don't receive any incentives for recommending it - in this case it's literally the only documentation I know of) You can find the source for a complete serial port driver in Apple's USBCDC driver, AppleUSBCDCDMM is the class that actually represents the serial port node.
It's relatively straightforward to open a so-called "kernel control" socket in the kernel, the individual APIs are documented here; from user space you use the normal BSD socket send/recv APIs. (this is also described in the aforementioned book) Your daemon can then connect to that, and all you'd need to do is push the data between the socket and the virtual serial port device. You'll need to handle disconnect events and such correctly of course.
Still, I think this is achievable as a first kernel project for an experienced C programmer (with some C++).
I hope that helps!