USB support

Basic support for USB 1.1 was added to HelenOS in mainline:1006 by merging code of student software project at MFF UK. The original homepage of the project is at ​http://helenos-usb.sourceforge.net/.

Supported devices

Host controllers

• UHCI
  • QEMU 0.14 (previous versions have rather serious bugs in the chip implementation)
  • real hardware: all tested machines (IA-32, AMD-64) worked (TODO: exact product ids)
• OHCI
  • VirtualBox (no known problem)
  • real hardware: yes (some PCI IDs may be missing)
• EHCI
  • only stub implementing hand off routine
  • works well in VirtualBox with USB 2.0 support enabled

Functions (endpoint devices)

• hubs
• HID
  • base keyboard (101 PC) - full support
  • mouse - cursor movement, clicking, wheel transformed into arrows (keys) presses
  • multimedia buttons (Play/Pause, E-mail, Save etc.) - printed into log
• mass storage
  • only stub querying device for vendor and product name

Various links

Links below may be duplicates of links located on developers' documentation page.

Core USB and host controller specifications

• ​USB 1.1 Specification
• ​OHCI Specification (Open Host Controller Interface, Release 1.0a)
• ​UHCI Design Guide (Universal Host Controller Interface, Revision 1.1)
• ​EHCI Specification (Enhanced Host Controller Interface, Revision 1.0)

Miscellaneous (USB related)

• ​The USB ID Repository (Linux)
• Axelson, Jan: USB Complete (Everything You Need to Develop Custom USB Peripherals)
  • ​Homepage of the book
  • ​On-line at Google books, PDF can be downloaded from ​here or ​here (all links points to 3rd edition which describes USB 2.0 as well)
• ​USB in a NutShell
• ​USB Made Simple
• ​USBlyzer (USB Protocol Analyzer) - not tried, for Windows, free trial for 33 days
• ​Virtual USB for Linux
• ​LUFA (MyUSB): USB library for AVR microcontrollers

HID

• ​HID page at USB.org
• ​HID 1.11
• ​HID Usage tables 1.12
• ​HID parser in Python (​direct link to archive)
• ​libhid - a user-space USB HID access library written in C
• ​Getting past the **UNAVAILABLE** for HID report descriptors in Linux
• ​Linux HID driver
• ​FreeBSD userland driver/daemon for USB HID devices

HelenOS

• Trochtová, Lenka: Device driver framework (master thesis)
  • Download PDF
  • ​On-line through Google viewer
• ​Adding HelenOS to GRUB on your real machine
  • ​The script (direct link)

Localization, Unicode, UTF & co.

• ​LangId values as defined by Microsoft
• ​Unicode overview (Wikipedia)
• ​UTF-16 and UCS-2 (Wikipedia) (these are used by string descriptors)

Workaround, hacks

• ​Device initialization (Linux vs. Microsoft way)
• ​Resetting UHCI ports on VIA chips problem
• ​Lengths of resets