Table of Contents
This chapter presents the Linux usbfs. You may prefer to avoid writing new kernel code for your USB driver; that's the problem that usbfs set out to solve. User mode device drivers are usually packaged as applications or libraries, and may use usbfs through some programming library that wraps it. Such libraries include libusb for C/C++, and jUSB for Java.
This particular documentation is incomplete, especially with respect to the asynchronous mode. As of kernel 2.5.66 the code and this (new) documentation need to be cross-reviewed.
Configure usbfs into Linux kernels by enabling the USB filesystem option (CONFIG_USB_DEVICEFS), and you get basic support for user mode USB device drivers. Until relatively recently it was often (confusingly) called usbdevfs although it wasn't solving what devfs was. Every USB device will appear in usbfs, regardless of whether or not it has a kernel driver; but only devices with kernel drivers show up in devfs.
Conventionally mounted at
/proc/bus/usb, usbfs
features include:
/proc/bus/usb/devices
... a text file
showing each of the USB devices on known to the kernel,
and their configuration descriptors.
You can also poll() this to learn about new devices.
/proc/bus/usb/BBB/DDD
... magic files
exposing the each device's configuration descriptors, and
supporting a series of ioctls for making device requests,
including I/O to devices. (Purely for access by programs.)
Each bus is given a number (BBB) based on when it was enumerated; within each bus, each device is given a similar number (DDD). Those BBB/DDD paths are not "stable" identifiers; expect them to change even if you always leave the devices plugged in to the same hub port. Don't even think of saving these in application configuration files. Stable identifiers are available, for user mode applications that want to use them. HID and networking devices expose these stable IDs, so that for example you can be sure that you told the right UPS to power down its second server. "usbfs" doesn't (yet) expose those IDs.