Piggy-backing new hardware using old usb-serial

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Good evening,

We are developing a custom piece of hardware that provides the
equivalent of two serial console interfaces. They do not speak the AT
command set. One port provides an interactive console to the user for
configuration purposes (via minicom/etc). The other speaks a proprietary
protocol used by purpose-built userspace tools. Neither port has an
inherent baud rate limit; both can fully utilize USB2 bandwidth.

The closest standard USB-IF class I could find is the cdc-acm device
class. However, this seems to be very much targeted at modems with ATx
commands. The linux cdc-acm drivers would put the hardware
at /dev/ttyACM and software seems to treat these like modems. The closer
matching usb-serial dongles all appear to have unstandardized drivers.

We would like our hardware to work "out of the box" on released Linux
versions (and to a lesser extent on windows). Our current prototypes
borrow the Sierra VID to trick the kernel into loading the sierra
driver. This works well for the interactive console. However, I assume
that distributing the device like this will have legal consequences.

I could write a custom driver, but then end users need to compile
+install it. Our device will never be widely available and thus our
driver will never be included in linux, ie: even future users will have
to compile+install for themselves. Because the USB logic is inside an
FPGA, I can readily change the hardware to suite any existing driver.

What driver should I target?
Is there a way to AUTOload an older driver despite the new VID:PID?
Should I give up and require a custom driver?

Thank you for any and all feedback/advice.


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