Table of Contents
Gadget drivers declare themselves through a struct usb_gadget_driver, which is responsible for most parts of enumeration for a struct usb_gadget. The response to a set_configuration usually involves enabling one or more of the struct usb_ep objects exposed by the gadget, and submitting one or more struct usb_request buffers to transfer data. Understand those four data types, and their operations, and you will understand how this API works.
This documentation was prepared using the standard Linux
kernel docproc tool, which turns text
and in-code comments into SGML DocBook and then into usable
formats such as HTML or PDF.
Other than the "Chapter 9" data types, most of the significant
data types and functions are described here.
However, docproc does not understand all the C constructs that are used, so some relevant information is likely omitted from what you are reading. One example of such information is endpoint autoconfiguration. You'll have to read the header file, and use example source code (such as that for "Gadget Zero"), to fully understand the API.
The part of the API implementing some basic driver capabilities is specific to the version of the Linux kernel that's in use. The 2.6 kernel includes a driver model framework that has no analogue on earlier kernels; so those parts of the gadget API are not fully portable. (They are implemented on 2.4 kernels, but in a different way.) The driver model state is another part of this API that is ignored by the kerneldoc tools.
The core API does not expose every possible hardware feature, only the most widely available ones. There are significant hardware features, such as device-to-device DMA (without temporary storage in a memory buffer) that would be added using hardware-specific APIs.
This API allows drivers to use conditional compilation to handle endpoint capabilities of different hardware, but doesn't require that. Hardware tends to have arbitrary restrictions, relating to transfer types, addressing, packet sizes, buffering, and availability. As a rule, such differences only matter for "endpoint zero" logic that handles device configuration and management. The API supports limited run-time detection of capabilities, through naming conventions for endpoints. Many drivers will be able to at least partially autoconfigure themselves. In particular, driver init sections will often have endpoint autoconfiguration logic that scans the hardware's list of endpoints to find ones matching the driver requirements (relying on those conventions), to eliminate some of the most common reasons for conditional compilation.
Like the Linux-USB host side API, this API exposes the "chunky" nature of USB messages: I/O requests are in terms of one or more "packets", and packet boundaries are visible to drivers. Compared to RS-232 serial protocols, USB resembles synchronous protocols like HDLC (N bytes per frame, multipoint addressing, host as the primary station and devices as secondary stations) more than asynchronous ones (tty style: 8 data bits per frame, no parity, one stop bit). So for example the controller drivers won't buffer two single byte writes into a single two-byte USB IN packet, although gadget drivers may do so when they implement protocols where packet boundaries (and "short packets") are not significant.