GSoC USB: Conclusion

Now that GSoC is coming to an end, I prepared the patches and pushed the code upstream.

r5691 contains the work done until today, which is what I’ll post as my final result to GSoC, too. Work won’t end on it however, so expect more patches in the future.

OHCI

OHCI works – except for interrupt transfers, which are mostly used (in boot environments at least) for keyboards.

xHCI

That one is more complicated than the other controllers combined, and while I made a couple of stupid mistakes that held me up for longer than I wanted, there are aspects in xHCI that make the bootstrap of the driver harder than I’d like it to be.

Once you got the command and event channels set up, it seems that xHCI provides a neat interface for getting all kinds of status information out of it. The only problem is that setting up these channels seems to be more complicated than the entire bring up of UHCI – at least, that’s where I’m stuck right now.

I’ll get back to it, but I hope that a couple of days of doing something else will help me to finally see the problem.

Conclusion

Doing both drivers was ambitious. While I didn’t have the burden of creating the stack design, and learning USB in the first place, like I had in 2007 (when I worked on UHCI for GSoC), it’s still two specifications to understand, two way of communication between the controller and the host system, and finally two drivers to write.

It was fun, but I’ll be more conservative in choosing my project, and estimating the required effort, next time. It’s much easier (and also more satisfying) to add some tasks when the job is done early than to remove them – especially when you get to strip milestones because the hardware is acting up.