From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri May 17 8:43:16 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from pc-ugarte.research.att.com (H-135-207-23-230.research.att.com [135.207.23.230]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 571B537B401 for ; Fri, 17 May 2002 08:43:07 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from cau@localhost) by pc-ugarte.research.att.com (8.11.0/8.11.0) id g4HFh2102369; Fri, 17 May 2002 11:43:02 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15589.9478.515238.677330@pc-ugarte.research.att.com> Date: Fri, 17 May 2002 11:43:02 -0400 From: Carlos Ugarte To: Fred Clift Cc: Marco Molteni , Subject: Re: writing a driver for the IBM ultraport camera (USB) In-Reply-To: <20020517092727.E82061-100000@vespa.dmz.orem.verio.net> References: <20020517072741.9472.qmail@cobweb.example.org> <20020517092727.E82061-100000@vespa.dmz.orem.verio.net> X-Mailer: VM 6.99 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-Homepage: http://www.cs.arizona.edu/~cau Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Fred Clift writes: > On Fri, 17 May 2002, Marco Molteni wrote: > > > [Bcc to -multimedia] > > > > On Thu, 16 May 2002 18:21:14 -0400, Carlos Ugarte wrote: > > > > > I'm working on a similar project - a FreeBSD driver for the Philips > > > webcams based on the Linux pwc driver. It's nowhere near working yet, > > > Would it be easier to just use the ugen driver and write a 'userland-only' > utility that leveraged the ugen driver's ability to already talk to the > device? Seems like that would save you a lot of hassle in developing > working code. There are, however, some bennefits to having a driver - > just wanted to mention this possible solution. That occurred to me, as I have seen the solution work first hand in another case. I have a Canon S110 "Digital Elph" still camera that unfortunately does not conform to the USB mass storage standard. That said, it is possible to get it to work with FreeBSD - there is a program by the name of s10sh that makes use of libusb (and ugen) to speak the language of the S110. I agree that doing something at user level would probably be easier than working on a driver. That said, I opted to work on a device driver instead for a couple of reasons. One is that I think it would be easier to drum up support from more applications if the device is given its own kernel space driver (even though a user space library might provide most of the same functionality). Another was that I did not feel familiar enough with USB (the standard) or ugen (the device driver) to know how well this would work. And then there is the process of writing a device driver - though the goal is to support a set of webcams, the "side effect" of learning more about the kernel and devices in general is what interested me the most. Carlos -- Carlos A. Ugarte cau@cs.arizona.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message