[haiku-development] Re: USB Keyboard and Debugger

> Might it be possible to reinitialize the USB ports and switch to a 
> slimmed down USB stack with support for just a handful of devices 
> such 
> as keyboard, simplified USB mass storage, and perhaps something else?

That'd be possible of course. The reason it isn't done is that it's 
quite a lot of work. I've started to implement a minimal USB stack at 
one point, but you'll really need pretty much a complete host 
controller driver for UHCI and OHCI that is polling based (because you 
don't have interrupts). Then you'd need to initialize the controllers 
with those drivers, do the addressing of the devices, interpret the 
device descriptors to find the keyboard, set up the transfer pipes and 
start scheduling transfers. This is pretty much about 50% of the whole 
USB stack. It's not enough to simply have control over a USB port, you 
still need to enumerate and address the keyboard below that port 
properly for this to work. And of course you couldn't return from such 
a KDL anymore, because you'd leave the controller in a completely 
different state and the real host controller driver couldn't make use 
of it anymore. For just retrieving debug output it'd be enough, but for 
the occasional drop to KDL to get info and back it wouldn't be usable.

It's certainly doable, but it's quite a lot of work and has only limited 
use. That's not to say that I necessarily won't get annoyed by it and 
still implement it (I do have a legacy free board here, no serial, no 
ps/2). Still I'd risk a bet to say that writing a polling nic driver to 
enable debugging via network cable would be simpler to implement.

Regards
Michael

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