Chapter 2. USB Host-Side API Model

Host-side drivers for USB devices talk to the "usbcore" APIs. There are two. One is intended for general-purpose drivers (exposed through driver frameworks), and the other is for drivers that are part of the core. Such core drivers include the hub driver (which manages trees of USB devices) and several different kinds of host controller drivers, which control individual busses.

The device model seen by USB drivers is relatively complex.

Accordingly, the USB Core API exposed to device drivers covers quite a lot of territory. You'll probably need to consult the USB 2.0 specification, available online from www.usb.org at no cost, as well as class or device specifications.

The only host-side drivers that actually touch hardware (reading/writing registers, handling IRQs, and so on) are the HCDs. In theory, all HCDs provide the same functionality through the same API. In practice, that's becoming more true on the 2.5 kernels, but there are still differences that crop up especially with fault handling. Different controllers don't necessarily report the same aspects of failures, and recovery from faults (including software-induced ones like unlinking an URB) isn't yet fully consistent. Device driver authors should make a point of doing disconnect testing (while the device is active) with each different host controller driver, to make sure drivers don't have bugs of their own as well as to make sure they aren't relying on some HCD-specific behavior. (You will need external USB 1.1 and/or USB 2.0 hubs to perform all those tests.)