Re: [PATCH v2] char: xillybus: Check endpoint type before allocing

From: Eli Billauer
Date: Mon May 23 2022 - 13:07:44 EST


On 23/05/22 19:06, Greg KH wrote:
If the device does not have the EXACT USB endpoints that you are
expecting (size, address, direction, type, etc.) at probe time reject
the device.
This is probably a good time to add some information about XillyUSB.

All XillyUSB devices have EP 1 IN and EP 1 OUT as bulk endpoints.

On top of that, they *may* have up to 14 additional bulk OUT endpoints, having the addresses EP 2 OUT to EP 15 OUT. The population of endpoint addresses is not necessarily continuous. Any set of OUT endpoint addresses is allowed. The driver doesn't know which of these endpoints are available initially.

Rather, it works like this: The driver uses the EP 1 IN and OUT endpoints to query the device for a data structure, which contains information on the device's communication channels. The driver sets up device files accordingly, and it also gets informed on which bulk OUT endpoints are present.

For what it's worth, I think it's fairly safe to assume that if a device returns a legal data structure (which passes a CRC test), it's a XillyUSB device. Either way, it's impossible to verify that all of the device's bulk OUT endpoints are correct before obtaining the data structure from the device. The fact that each device has a different set of communication channels, and that the driver learns about them in run-time is the whole trick with Xillybus and XillyUSB.

And just in case you wonder why there's only one bulk IN endpoint: All inbound communication, control as well as data, is multiplexed into this single endpoint. That's in order to allow the device better control on which communication channel is serviced at any time, with a few microseconds' granularity. The same trick is unfortunately infeasible in the other direction.

I don't have any particular view on how the device should be validated, but I thought this information would be helpful.

Thanks,
Eli