Re: Unable to set "iInterface" in usb gadget via configfs

["Andrew P. Lentvorski" <bsder@allcaps.org>]

On 1/17/20 1:25 AM, Felipe Balbi wrote:

> why? No behavior changed. Look at the very first commit on
> f_hid.c. commit 71adf118946957839a13aa4d1094183e05c6c094 contains the
> following:

Oops.  I missed that.  Sorry for not being complete enough.  My fault.

> Now, if there's a real usecase for this. Something that can attract, as
> per Dave B., 3 or more users, then we can consider adding it
> upstream. Remember that if we add support for changing interface
> strings, it has to be implemented for *all* functions and validated on
> all functions, then properly documented as a configfs ABI which can
> never change anymore.

Erg.  I did not realize that this was not going to be limited to just
f_hid.c.

That's ... ugly.  Reeeally ugly.  And a *LOT* of work.

I can certainly see that "some devices do this" is nowhere close to
enough justification for that.

>> control board the ability to now also be accessed via ethernet or
>> wireless (or even a better USB protocol) and thus now has an upgrade or
>> higher performance path is a *really* useful thing.  And the Beaglebone
>> Black is a really good "protocol engine".  Finally, after making the usb
>> gadget emulation work, I can probably blow a bunch of Windows machines
>> away completely since something like a Beaglebone Black is more than
>> sufficient to handle the control without any outside intervention.
> 
> You're getting to a point where things start to get interesting. What
> exactly are you trying to do?

I've got both a GPIB (with USB 1.0(!) only--as far as I can tell--talk
about a relic) and an industrial controller (unknown protocol but USB
tracing and a signal analyzer shows pretty much 1-1 so reverse
engineering it doesn't seem problematic) currently sitting on my desk.
I have one system which has enough USB devices in it that it won't work
on a USB 3 system because the Intel USB 3 chipset allocates twice as
many endpoints per device and hits an internal limit--they want a USB
upgrade as an intermediate move to ethernet.

I have a half-dozen other similar type requests queued behind these.
People are finally reaching a critical point where they can't keep
ancient hardware, ancient drivers, ancient Windows, and ancient
computers all running anymore--even VM's are starting to fail as too
many things have some level of timing baked into the driver (normally
unintentionally).

>> Anyhow, let me know whether I should attack the problem or not.

At this point, I suspect that the correct answer is "Keep an eye on this
while moving forward."

If I stumble over more drivers that are trying to use iInterface for
some reason, I will see if setting it to 0x00 makes things choose a
different path.  Simply changing the default to effectively 0x00-unused
seems like a lot less work and might pick up 90% of the use cases.  It
also means the scope would be limited to f_hid.c.  If I hit this a
couple times, I'll have a lot more justification behind me.

If I start seeing cases where I actually need to specify the iInterface
stuff, I'll come back with data and we can revisit this again.  I
suspect that someone is eventually going to drop a CDC class device in
front of me, and that will give me more data, too.  If ever I reach the
 point where I have multiple devices working around this, hopefully you
will find my arguments far more persuasive.  :)

> you could use dummy_hcd as well.

Interesting.  I did not know about this, but I will keep it in mind.


Thanks for being so patient.  Sorry for wasting your time only to come
back to "do nothing".

-a