Help with USB storage program and USB 3.0
 

OK, I admit I'm a newbie at this - especially the linux part. I have inherited a USB storage program that tests USB hard disk drives. Up to now, I have been successful at making updates to the code when needed because accessing the USB device has never been a problem.

First, I am running Slackware 12.1.0 with Linux Kernel 2.6.24.5.

The program basically monitors the USB devices via /proc/bus/usb/devices and when there's a new device, checks to see if the vendor ID is one it should test. If so, the first thing it does is go out and do a read capacity via the usb_bulk_write (eventually), which I assume is in the usb library located in /usr/include (please verify). I know that usb.h is in the includes in the usb_storage.c that is part of the program code.

Anyway, this has always worked on USB 2.0 devices, but now that I have a USB 3.0 device, it errors out at the usb_bulk_write command (return code is 31). I was under the impression that USB 3.0 was backward compatible. Also, if I just plug in the drive without running my program, the system sees it just fine. I am just plugging the USB 3.0 device into a USB 2.0 bus.

I am kind of at a loss as to what would be causing this. Seems to me if it worked on USB 2.0, it would work on 3.0. Any ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Equinn

Guys and Gals,

I have done some more digging around and have more information. This program is using libusb v0.1.12. Also, I made a mistake in my statement above. It's not failing at usb_bulk_write (the return code from that is 31, which is the correct number of bytes transferred). It's actually failing on the subsequent usb_bulk_read. It's supposed to return 8 bytes and its returning 0.

After some searching on the net, I found some information on libusb. I found there is a bit of test software that's distributed with libusb that identifies information about the devices attached to the bus. I ran this little test on both types of drives and found that there are some differences.

All of the other information was the same between the two drives. I'm wondering if any of these things are used by usb_bulk_read. I'm off to do more digging, but hopefully this will spark some thoughts on this and help me get there a little faster.

Thanks,
Equinn