Re: Problems with file conduit and Treo 680

["David A. Desrosiers" <desrod gnu-designs com>]

On Sun, 2007-09-23 at 18:44 -0400, Adam C Powell IV wrote:
> Then I do "gdb pilot-xfer" and "run -p usb: -l", wait a bit, and again
> the pilot-xfer process goes to max CPU.  Hmm, oh well, no debugging
> symbols, this is Debian. :-(

> I can try rebuilding pilot-link with dh_strip removed, but don't have
> time now.  Does the strace output help?

You're dealing with the latest pilot-link version in CVS, yes? Because
there are quite a few post-release fixes that have been dropped in that
may alleviate some of the issues you're seeing. 

As for the timing issue, that's a bit more complicated than I think we
can solve entirely in userland. Since the physical device presents
itself as a different entity on the usb subsystem before any kernel
driver can be loaded (or not loaded), pilot-link has to just wait until
something it understands (i.e. the visor driver, or the right usb
interface presented via libusb) exists before it can communicate with
it. 

If the device is sitting on the cable with a mount-point mapped to it
(i.e. "Drive Mode" through uhci_hcd, for example, vs. the visor driver),
there is little pilot-link can do to kick it out of drive mode and put
it back into "I'm a Palm now" mode. 

It may be some magical (publicly undocumented, of course) DLP command,
or it may be something much uglier (start the communication, kill the
socket, try again)... I'm not really sure how this process works on
Windows, because the USBport.dll file that contains this info, does not
have any source available for me to look at, nor is this information
covered in the Palm/ACCESS SDK that is available to developers. 

It would be interesting though, to build the libusb support in Cygwin
(or native libusb support in Windows), and try to get it working in the
same way, to see if the timing issue is still a factor there or not. 

Anyone with a Windows box and some good usb sniffer software care to
take a whack at this? 


-- 
David A. Desrosiers
desrod gnu-designs com
setuid gmail com
http://projects.plkr.org/
Skype...: 860-967-3820