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Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition
book

Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition

by Jonathan Corbet, Alessandro Rubini, Greg Kroah-Hartman
February 2005
Beginner to intermediate
636 pages
22h 51m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Linux Device Drivers, 3rd Edition

Chapter 13. USB Drivers

The universal serial bus (USB) is a connection between a host computer and a number of peripheral devices. It was originally created to replace a wide range of slow and different buses—the parallel, serial, and keyboard connections—with a single bus type that all devices could connect to.[1] USB has grown beyond these slow connections and now supports almost every type of device that can be connected to a PC. The latest revision of the USB specification added high-speed connections with a theoretical speed limit of 480 MBps.

Topologically, a USB subsystem is not laid out as a bus; it is rather a tree built out of several point-to-point links. The links are four-wire cables (ground, power, and two signal wires) that connect a device and a hub, just like twisted-pair Ethernet. The USB host controller is in charge of asking every USB device if it has any data to send. Because of this topology, a USB device can never start sending data without first being asked to by the host controller. This configuration allows for a very easy plug-and-play type of system, whereby devices can be automatically configured by the host computer.

The bus is very simple at the technological level, as it’s a single-master implementation in which the host computer polls the various peripheral devices. Despite this intrinsic limitation, the bus has some interesting features, such as the ability for a device to request a fixed bandwidth for its data transfers in order to reliably support ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596005903Errata Page