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Article Discussions / AN changing USB driver stack to 32-bit
« on: January 26, 2018, 10:35:46 am »
AN is currently working on XHCI. Along with that there is a decision to make the USB driver stack (mostly) 32-bit.
The stated reason for this was to increase data throughput.
Today, the USBxHCD.SYS and USBD.SYS drivers have been changed. Along with that change came a change in driver interface between these drivers that is no longer publicly documented (The driver interface of the old 16-bit drivers is documented in a HTML document as part of the DDK and therefore available to anyone with a DDK license).
Currently, the client drivers (USBPRT.SYS, USBMSD.ADD, USBAUDIO.SYS etc.) have not been changed and the driver interface of USBD.SYS still allows the use of 16-bit client drivers with the new 32-bit components.
However, there are ideas to also change the driver interface of all client drivers and make them 32-bit also.
What that means in practice is that you will no longer be able to combine say USBMSD.ADD and USBAUDIO.SYS from my driver set with the AN driver set.
Since AN has only little interest in offering audio and video support in OS/2 (it's not their business use case) that effectively would mean that development of USBAUDIO.SYS would be terminated and also that ArcaOS is become more and more proprietary, effectively a new OS next to OS/2.
Please speak up now if you don't want that to happen. I have always provided free USB drivers to the community and Wim and me we have invested considerable effort in making USBAUDIO.SYS what it is today. I see AN's need to make money from ArcaOS but I also see that with an ever diminishing user base, this step will be the last nail in the coffin of OS/2.
While there might be technical reasons I think that changing the driver interface will lock out anybody else in developing a USB driver (think about Wim's USBECD.SYS driver for example) and the OS/2 community is already short on driver developers.
Lars
The stated reason for this was to increase data throughput.
Today, the USBxHCD.SYS and USBD.SYS drivers have been changed. Along with that change came a change in driver interface between these drivers that is no longer publicly documented (The driver interface of the old 16-bit drivers is documented in a HTML document as part of the DDK and therefore available to anyone with a DDK license).
Currently, the client drivers (USBPRT.SYS, USBMSD.ADD, USBAUDIO.SYS etc.) have not been changed and the driver interface of USBD.SYS still allows the use of 16-bit client drivers with the new 32-bit components.
However, there are ideas to also change the driver interface of all client drivers and make them 32-bit also.
What that means in practice is that you will no longer be able to combine say USBMSD.ADD and USBAUDIO.SYS from my driver set with the AN driver set.
Since AN has only little interest in offering audio and video support in OS/2 (it's not their business use case) that effectively would mean that development of USBAUDIO.SYS would be terminated and also that ArcaOS is become more and more proprietary, effectively a new OS next to OS/2.
Please speak up now if you don't want that to happen. I have always provided free USB drivers to the community and Wim and me we have invested considerable effort in making USBAUDIO.SYS what it is today. I see AN's need to make money from ArcaOS but I also see that with an ever diminishing user base, this step will be the last nail in the coffin of OS/2.
While there might be technical reasons I think that changing the driver interface will lock out anybody else in developing a USB driver (think about Wim's USBECD.SYS driver for example) and the OS/2 community is already short on driver developers.
Lars