USB Driver Enhancements

This section describes USB driver enhancements in the Solaris 9 4/04 release. These enhancements are available for x86 and SPARC platforms.

• New generic USB driver – USB 1.0 devices can now be accessed and manipulated by applications that use standard UNIX® read(2) and write(2) system calls, and without writing a special kernel driver. Additional features include the following:

  • Applications can access raw device data and device status.

  • This driver 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.

• 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 the usbser_edge(7D) man page, 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), including documentation, is available. For up-to-date information about USB driver development, including information on the DDK, go to http://developers.sun.com.