From: Forrest Kenney [Forrest.Kenney@hp.com]
Sent: Monday, January 03, 2005 12:46 PM
To: Info-VAX@Mvb.Saic.Com
Subject: Re: What's the state of USB 2.0 support in VMS 8.2?
As Fred Kleisorge has already stated we are working on it for
V8.3. For the time being I am still doing the work on V7.3-2 and if
possible I will make it available as an add on for V8.2. But this is
a work in progress and any number of things could delay or cause it to
be canceled.
As some folks have seen or heard in V8.2 can boot off a USB
mass storage device. There are a couple of qualifications here, the
code as it exists in V8.2 is latent support for future systems that
may have USB DVD's for installation. The code has not been tested
and we know of problems using it as a system disk. At the present
time there are no plans to make USB mass storage devices supported
as your system disk. The second problem is that the firmware at the
present time works with about 1/2 of all the USB mass storage devices
I have tried. I am working with the owner of the firmware to get
this fixed. His priority is to support a USB DVD for installation
any thing beyond this gets looked at when he has time.
Finally, until some work is done to the EFI standard supporting
USB 2.0 is a bit of a problem. The EFI standard did not allow for
multifunction USB controllers which makes it virtually impossible to
correctly identify what disk and controller a system booted off of
at run time. There is work going on to rectify this problem and
hopefully by the 8.3 time frame that will be in place. This is
not a gating item to our adding USB 2.0 to OpenVMS.
Here is what is in 8.2 for USB by platform:
Alpha IA64
------------------------------------- ------------------------------
Lucent USS 344 controller
Philips ISP1516 controller
NEC 7020100 Controller(1) NEC 7020100(1)
Others(2) Others(2)
USB Hubs all USB hubs all
USB Printers(3) USB Printers (3)
Prolific USB to serial Prolific USB to serial
USB Modems(4) USB Modems(4)
Keyboard LK463 (5) Keyboard LK463(5)
Mice Mice
USB Mass storage Bulk only
devices, Flash cards, Disks,
DVD/CD's not floppies
1 - The NEC 70201001 should also work but I have not had
a chance to test it.
2 - In theory any controller based on the OHCI standard
should work but you will need to add an entry for it
in sys$user_config.dat and give it a shot.
3 - We only guarantee to send ASCII data to them correctly
if they need special formatting the driver does not
do that.
4 - They must conform the the USB modem standard.
5 - Other keyboards should work but not all features like extra
buttons, volume controls etc. will not.
We have several drivers internally that may show up in
the future, like a joy stick driver, more USB to serial converters,
a button driver for keyboards with extra buttons. We are looking
at what of these make sense to release as well as evaluating a way
to allow users to use a generic Human Interface Driver, button boxes
etc. without having to write a driver. We are also looking at a
a generic USB driver to support random devices like USB smart card
readers, scanners etc. None of this is committed work and may never
get done.
Forrest Kenney
OpenVMS Group