[Oberon] Bluebottle USB

[Stauber Sven Philipp]

Dear All,
 
The crazy fresh release dated 09.12.2005 includes the new version of the Bluebottle USB system software.
 
User-visible advantages:
- USB 2.0 support
- Fixed critical bug in UHCI driver which broke many flash drives
- Mass Storage Driver improved: support for multiple logical units (-> Cardreader support), improved performance
- On-demand USB class/device driver loading
 
Issues:
- different experiences on different host controller implementations (on some host controllers, some devices don't work well)
- bus topology handling seems somewhat fragile (will be fixed)
- The crazy fresh release dated 13.12.05 uses the old (wrong) driver names in the boot config strings / Aos.Par 
 
Reliabitlity:
- Data-Integrity: I never have seen any problems regarding the actual data integrity: If a USB transfer did not fail, the associated data was always correct, but...
- some host controller / device combinations do not work reliable for large transfers (USB transfers fail)
 
Usage:
** A) Manual loading
1. Load hub driver: AosUsbHubDriver.Install ~
2. Load host controller driver(s): AosUsbUhci.Install ~ AosUsbOhci.Install ~ AosUsbEhci.Install ~
3. Load device driver(s): AosUsbMouse.Install ~ AosUsbKeyboard.Install ~ AosUsbStorage.Install ~
** B) Automatic PCI/USB driver loading
1. AosPCITools.DetectHardware ~ (will do the job ;-)
 
I will continue to test/fix/improve the Bluebottle USB software for the next two weeks.
 
If you find some time to test it on your system, it would be nice if you could provide me some feedback. In particular, what kind of USB host controller you are using (Use AosPCITools.Scan under Bluebottle or PCITools.Scan under Oberon to get this information) and which device does/doesn't work (Use WMUsbInfo.Open or AosUsbInfo.Show details ~ under Bluebottle).
 
For information about USB related commands, see AosUsb.Text. The shortest way to get the USB system up is to call AosPCITools.DetectHardware. This will load all PCI/USB device driver modules necessary.
 
Testing: 
The currently easiest way of getting an idea of how reliable a USB mass storage device works on your system is the DiskBench operation under Bluebottle. Start the Partitions tool (accessible under BB start menu), select the tab "Partitions" and there the operation "Benchmark". If this test completes with default settings (1000 blocks, all blocksizes) without any erros, you can exspect the tested device to be useful for daily work.
 
Regards,
Sven Stauber