November 11, 2020

libusb

Probably the best way to develop a linux USB application is to use libusb.

Don't be confused by libusbx. There was some drama and politics as some point in time that led to libusbx being forked from libusb. That is apparently long over. Someone needs to tell the Fedora project people since they still offer libusbx packages which should be ignored. Maybe there is some software that depends on these packages, but I don't know or care.

I give the link to my Maple-util project since it was my starting point using libusb and seemed to work out OK.

A person like me wonders just what lies beneath libusb and what is the fundamental interface to the USB drivers on linux. Apparently there was once "usbfs", but this is a thing of the past (so ignore any searches that lead you to this sort of thing). Now a person uses sysfs, but I have not yet dug into all the details and am using libusb. A naive old time unix programmer might expect something like /dev/usb, but that is not the game. Much like the network, it is all handled in another way.


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Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org