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Frequently Asked Questions
There is a separate page for libwdi-specific FAQs.
- Can libusb be used inside a USB device that runs Linux?
- Can I use libusb to open a file on a USB storage device?
- Can I create a driverless device using HID class?
Can libusb be used inside a USB device that runs Linux?
No, libusb provides a API for writing software on the host. Of course, if the device also acts as a USB host then libusb could still be useful, but only for the host part of the device.
Can I use libusb to open a file on a USB storage device?
Yes, libusb can be used for low-level communication with USB Mass Storage Class devices. But in order to access a file on such a device you must first implement Mass Storage Class, SCSI and the particular filesystem used on the device, most commonly FAT32. No, we can not do this for you. Please study existing open source implementations to learn about this, one minimal implementation exists in libpayload from the coreboot project, or simply mount the storage device if you just want to read the file.
Can I create a driverless device using HID class?
Yes, sortof, but the device will only be really easy to access on Microsoft Windows.
It is important to remember that USB devices are never driverless, rather quite the opposite. Multiple kernel drivers are always involved: USB stack with USB core, USB hub drivers, maybe a composite class driver, and then ultimately a class- or device-specific driver. This is true for every operating system, and also when using libusb.
On Windows it is trivial to program HID class devices directly, because the HID class-specific driver in Windows exposes a simple file-like API. For some applications this can be sufficient, but it is a tradeoff which means that most features of USB can not be used by the device, since the HID class only allows interrupt endpoints and since the format of communication over the endpoints is specified in the HID class as reports.
Besides the USB protocol restrictions, using the HID class is much more inconvenient on systems other than Windows. For what is probably historical reasons, the generic file-like API exposed by the Windows HID class-specific driver is unique. On other systems, the HID class driver does not offer a similar simple generic API.
If the broadest platform compatiblity is important (this may be why you look toward libusb in the first place) then a much more neutral alternative is to use a vendor-specific device class. This requires that a device-specific kernel driver be installed on Windows, but that process can be automated completely using libwdi.
