SPARC: USB Driver Enhancements

This section describes USB driver enhancements in this Solaris release.

• New generic USB driver – USB devices can now be accessed and manipulated by applications using standard UNIX® read(2) and write(2) system calls, and without writing a special kernel driver. Additional features include:

  • Applications have access to raw device data and device status.

  • Supports control, bulk, and interrupt (in and out) transfers.

  For more information, refer to the ugen(7D) man page and the USB DDK at: http://developers.sun.com/solaris/developer/support/driver/usb.html

• Digi Edgeport USB support – Provides support for several Digi Edgeport USB to serial port converter devices.

  • New devices are accessed as /dev/term/[0-9]* and /dev/cua/[0-9]*.

  • USB serial ports are usable as any other serial port would be, except that they cannot serve as a local serial console. The fact that their data is run through a USB port is transparent to the user.

  For more information, see usbser_edge(7D), or go to http://www.digi.com and http://www.sun.com/io.

• Documentation and binary support for user-written kernel and userland drivers – A Solaris USB Driver Development Kit (DDK) is available. For up-to-date information on USB driver development, including information on the DDK, go to: http://developers.sun.com/solaris/developer/support/driver/usb.html

The EHCI and OHCI Drivers

Features of the EHCI driver include:

• Complies with enhanced host controller interface that supports USB 2.0.

• Supports high-speed control, bulk, and interrupt transfers.

• Currently, there is no support for high-speed isochronous transactions. For example, USB 2.0 audio devices are not supported.

If there are USB 2.0 and USB 1.x devices on the system, the EHCI and OHCI drivers hand-off device control depending upon the type of device that is connected to the system.

• The USB 2.0 PCI card has one EHCI controller and one or more OHCI controllers.

• A USB 1.1 device is dynamically assigned to the OHCI controller when it is plugged in. A USB 2.0 device is dynamically assigned to the EHCI controller when it is plugged in.