Hans: Since you're thinking about the problems involved in exporting USB devices over the network, here are some ideas you should be aware of. The USB core is set up to use two levels of drivers for every USB device: one driver for the device itself and then a separate level of drivers for all the device's interfaces. When we talk about "USB drivers", we really are referring to the interface drivers -- things like usbhid, usb-storage, btusb, and so on. There is only one higher-level "USB device" driver, named simply "usb" although it is sometimes referred to as "usb-generic" (the code is in drivers/usb/core/generic.c). You can see it in /sys/bus/usb/drivers. It's mostly a placeholder; about the only significant thing it does is choose a default configuration to install when a device is first probed. All along I have thought we could have an alternative driver, one that would do something with a USB device other than make it show up on the system in the usual way. The most obvious other possibility is to export the device over the network. I'm not sure if this approach is really practical, but perhaps you can make it work. Potential problems include issues like: Should the device show up in usbfs? What about udev? What about the writable attributes in sysfs? How would we get an alternative driver to bind in place of the generic one? If you decide this isn't the way to go, that's fine. I just thought you should be aware of the possibility. Alan Stern -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-usb" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
