[hpsdr] vista and LibUSB-win32

[Daniel Quigley]

 Hi Ken, So far (as you note) there is general confusion and multiple paths on how to get libusb stable and functioning correctly on Vista and 64-bit systems. I have been investigating this issue in hopes of documenting a "works every time" step-by-step sequence to cover those systems for the wiki quick startup page.  
 
libusb exists because application developers wanted an easier way to gain direct (more or less) access to USB devices. The net-net is that libusb was designed to fill that gap on Windows 2000 and XP systems. It never designed to run on Vista or 64bit systems and changes in the way Vista handles drivers created additional incompatibilities.  
 
Subsequently Microsoft released winusb (supported on Windows XP and Vista systems) which does about the same thing as libusb. It's not rocket science to rewrite applications to use winusb, but it is not trivial either and may introduce other problems.  
 
There are reports that applications that use libusb can "work" on 64bit and Vista systems. In fact for XP64 systems there is a driver compiled to work (see the forum post from Rick - W2GPS).  The most common Vista-32 advice is to run the USBIODriver setup under "Windows Xp SP2" compatibility mode.  However, even with that step there are reports that some or all USB hubs attached to a system will stop working when the libusb driver is installed and/or can cause BSOD conditions.  There is one recent (9/25/08) patch on sourceforge.net that addresses one potential Vista instability (see: Vista usb_get_descriptor sometimes needs more than 8 bytes) but I doubt that will solve every Vista problem. 
 
I have not nailed down a solid set of instructions (yet) that works through enough of the Vista stability, UAL and device driver angles to make it worthwhile committing to the quick startup wiki doc.  
 
I would like to run PowerSDR-HPSDR on my big, fat and fast Vista 64 system - but everything I have seen (so far anyway) points to the strong possibility of creating general USB or other system instabilities - which is (for me at least) too bitter to contemplate.  Ultimately, it will take some additional software work and testing to completely solve this problem.  I am not privvy to where Vista support sits in the feature request queue.
 
In short: XP64 bit looks good using the libusb-win64 driver with some additional steps.  HPSDR on Vista, appears, for now, unsupported at best.  
 
Dan (N7HQ)
> From: ke2n at cs.com> To: hpsdr at hpsdr.org> Date: Sun, 11 Jan 2009 03:50:26 +0000> Subject: [hpsdr] vista and LibUSB-win32> > ***** High Performance Software Defined Radio Discussion List *****> > well - I have seen now a number of people with the same problem I had.> > I am guessing that there is a problem with the LibUSB driver and Vista.> > There is a lot of stuff on the 'net about this between programming types > (that I do not understand)> some of it says that MSFT wants you to use winusb not libusb for Vista (but > don't quote me)> > the programs> > load_firmwareV1.1.exe> upload_fpgav1.1.exe> > that are both failing*, were written by Phil Covington and rely on functions > in this driver.> > maybe he would care to weigh in on the compatibility issue?> > Ken> > * windows says "faulting module = ntdll.dll, exception code = 0xc0000005 " > for both> > === > > _______________________________________________> HPSDR Discussion List> To post msg: hpsdr at hpsdr.org> Subscription help: http://lists.hpsdr.org/listinfo.cgi/hpsdr-hpsdr.org> HPSDR web page: http://hpsdr.org> Archives: http://lists.hpsdr.org/pipermail/hpsdr-hpsdr.org/
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