USB/IP Project | Hacker News Reader

USB/IP Project

usbip.sourceforge.net

152 pointsmef59 comments

I've got a couple of the Chinese made "Remote USB" servers which are interesting but not as compatible as I would like.

What I find really amusing is that back when USB was proposed I argued that rather than create an entirely new infrastructure why not just use Ethernet packets. There are additional protocol types available in the bit encoding and all sorts of infrastructure that already supported layer 2 switching. Plus the "phy" (10/100 at the time) was dirt cheap and already available. It never went anywhere, and at the time I figured that nobody wants to support a standard that they can't see how to make licensing money off of it. Somewhere I have VHDL code for a PC parallel port emulator that ran over my protocol. It fit in a small FPGA with the ethernet MAC so it wasn't like we were talking about a lot of gates. Just no consortium fees and no way to keep people out of the ecosystem you didn't like.

Doing USB over IP is an interesting way of re-creating that work (although mine was multi-master so technically a bit better :-)). Of course these days USB 3.0 is faster than the ethernet port on most machines so it was no doubt doomed from the start. But its fun to do. The SATA over Ethernet stuff that CoRAID did was like that, very nice work.

It's been funny to watch the various phy standards converge in feature-space (alas, not interop-space) over time. PCI got a packet architecture with addresses and routing and credit-based flow control, USB got a packet architecture with addresses and routing and credit-based flow control, SATA said "screw it, we'll just become PCI-e, because they have packets and routing and flow control," and thunderbolt basically is PCI-e...

Unfortunately I think Ethernet might be too fragmented to ever take the convergence to its logical conclusion. But who knows. If someone high on the food chain at Intel wakes up on the other side of the bed one day it could happen.

Ethernet's also got the fun problem of the length of the runs being hugely different than pcie. What I expect is some kind of optical interface because of that. Optical thunderbolt might be the way for that to happen.

I thought 40G/100G ethernet was already optical (and multiplexed, much like PCIe)?

EDIT: yep https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Gigabit_Ethernet

I'm pretty sure that the only obstacles against "ethernet as a truly universal bus" are either minor (someone's got to invest in making adapter interfaces) or of the "why bother" variety. Unfortunately the latter is a bit of a show stopper as far as I can tell :)

Hadn't thought about 40G/100G ethernet. It'd definitely be in that same area for doing that. I'd definitely agree that the obstacles at this point are either minor or a "why bother" kind of thing. With speeds continuing to go up, I'd expect it in a generator or two simply because the "why bother" will shift the other way, why bother to make a new standard when this one does it too and is nearly ubiquitous. My guess at least for peripherials is going to be in the optical thunderbolt area, more because of the way the device network matches what people are designing for anyway. I'd guess once there's two standards, a local (optical pcie) and remote (optical ethernet), things might begin converging more and more until it's less distinct between the two.

I'd expect optical more because it's easier to get high bandwidth and low latency on interconnects than copper because of the lower crosstalk and everything. It's just a question of market forces pushing things to converge.

Thunderbolt is PCI-e... plus DisplayPort, because we need two different serial protocols!

(And it frequently carries USB and Ethernet. So many protocols.)

The Ethernet phy is actually pretty expensive, especially compared to USB 1.0. The isolation transformers alone are $1. Of course you could skip the isolation like some backplanes do.

The ID assignment for USB is pretty awful and so is the robustness - for larger products it seems Ethernet is on the rise again.

I feel the same way (that ethernet is a perfectly good way of moving data around), so I created this a while back as a side project:

  https://github.com/mfassler/eFirmata

Basically, I wanted USB, but I wanted much longer cable-lengths than USB, so I used ethernet.

TL;DR: It doesn't work. The project has been abandoned, the last update is >4 years old. Don't waste your time.

Two weeks ago I have had to implement a solution that, for technical reasons, required a usb/ip implementation so I compared everything that was available.

I spent half a day on the project, perusing mailing lists and documentation trying to get usb/ip (as linked here) to work. Eventually, I got discovery working (win7 client connecting to linux/arm server) but the connection would never be established.

Eventually, since usb/ip turned out to be a horrible waste of time, I used a professional solution for about $40 which took 5min to set up and works like a charm since then.

what solution did you end up with (soft- or hardware?) and what devices was it supporting?

I've got a bunch of things that I'd like more switchable than standard 'kvm' type muxes can do, so curious how it worked out.

Yes, please... what did you wind up using?

I ended up using the solution from http://www.virtualhere.com/

The server runs fine even on a raspi 2, to which I switched after having some problems running it on a beaglebone black.

Just buy one of these: http://www.amazon.com/Silex-SX-DS-4000U2-Print-Server-800MHz... .

Works awesome, lets you buy the cheap non-workgroup version of pretty much everything (printer, scanner, label printer, ...) and still hook it up to a central server.

I have a Fujitsu ScanSnap ix500 hooked up this way, which scans directly to Dropbox. Put the scanner anywhere where it's convenient to access, put paper in it, press scan button, by the time you walk back to your desk it's on the dropbox. Order of magnitude improvement over other setups.

At ~ $150, that is an expensive solution, IMHO.

Depends what you compare it against, I guess. Seemed like a bargain to me.

For a third of that price, you can get a box that's also got a built-in ethernet switch and two WiFi interfaces. You're paying a ton for software convenience.

For example?

What, a Raspberry Pi (which for that price doesn't have ethernet, wifi or a case for that matter), and on which I'll have to wait 5 minutes before the OCR is done that my central server takes 10 seconds to do; and which requires Windows 10 which didn't even exist when I first got my setup 2-3 years ago?

Hell no. Just get any wireless router from the past 3-4 years and you've got USB and fast networking on a cheap box, and you can install a print server or usbip server depending on your preferences. That $150 box is probably even using the same 800MHz MIPS SoC as the $50 routers.

(And what are you getting at with implying that using a RasPi instead of a turnkey solution would cause Windows-related trouble or require doing the heavy processing somewhere else than your current setup?)

I'm really not sure where you're getting your specs from, but all Raspberry Pi's are a fraction of that price, come with ethernet, and don't require Windows 10. Plus the newer RPi's are quad-core ARM with 1GB RAM, which I'd wager is more than your device comes with.

I'm not trying to dismiss your device though. I do believe that it works well. But as another commenter stated, your device is priced up because of the software convenience rather than being a "bargain" in terms of hardware specifications.

Being able to pdfgrep through years of documents has been a massive time-saver for me. My ix500 paid for itself in time saved and then some.

Although, my setup is less than ideal since the ix500 does not play nicely with linux. I scan to a shared folder on my Linux Desktop from Windows 7 running in VirtualBox.

I bought one of these: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005GM1Q1O/?&tag=bcgpfeed-2...

It's dirt cheap ($10-20), easy to load linux on [1], and it can be a simple file server, it can run minidlna, google cloud print [2], all kinds of stuff.

800MHz is not a screamer, but most simple I/O tasks like A/V streaming and printing are a walk in the park.

[1] http://archlinuxarm.org/platforms/armv5/pogoplug-series-4

[2] http://geekvisit.com/hacking-pogoplug-mobile-adding-airprint...

Similarly, I found a used pogoplug at a thrift shop with a $5 sticker on it. I bought it knowing little about it but suspecting it could be hacked. At the checkout they told me the sticker color indicated it was half off, so it cost me less than $3.

With the shipping software the pogoplugs are usually useless secondhand, as the web interface is hidden if you haven't registered the device with the company (and it can't be de-authed without the original owner's credentials). But the administrative interface is still available, if you know the path. Dropbear is already installed, so you can just start it, log in, overwrite the bootloader[0] and run one of several Linux distributions from a flash drive (I use Debian[1]).

My unit[2] has a 700 MHz dual-ARMv6. It only has 256MB of built-in RAM, but it's simple to allocate 1GB of the OS flash drive as swap.

Last year I picked up a number of old MIDI keyboards a local college was throwing out. I figured they were just old and the college had replaced them with something newer, but they worked fine for me under Linux. So I offered one of them to my brother, and he couldn't get it to work under Windows. Of course, it turns out the device is 15 years old and never had a 64-bit driver. So I've been experimenting with using the Python midistream package to stream MIDI over ethernet to a Windows host. Unfortunately, the package (since subsumed by a project called scenic[3]) hasn't had a new release since 2012. But it still works, and it makes for a pretty fun hack.

[0] http://projects.doozan.com/uboot/

[1] http://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,16044

[2] https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B004TDY924

You can do the same with a RaspberryPi:

http://vmwarebits.com/content/virtualhere-raspberry-pi-usb-s...

> lets you buy the cheap non-workgroup version of pretty much everything (printer, scanner, label printer, ...) and still hook it up to a central server.

I would argue that this benefit is probably mostly historical by now. These days, the wifi-enabled versions of at least printers is generally within less than $150 of their non-networked cousins.

I hate to say it but sourceforge feels like the new "Meg" these days, even uBlock Origin tries to block going to sourceforge. Looks like an interesting project though. I love the support of ReactOS, but I wonder if the project is still active at all? The featured last bit of news is from 2011.

Agreed, they have done a really solid job of eroding trust over the years.

I dunno what Meg is, but I did chuckle when uBlock Origin blocked SF. Good for them.

Family Guy joke.

Brian (I believe) gets called the new Meg in an episode, Meg tries to join in on the joke only to get told to shut up.

Comedic genius!

I thought it might be referencing to "Mega Upload"

Was going to post about this but saw that you already had: http://i.imgur.com/KBCmcyb.png

This is also part of the mainline Linux kernel now (look under drivers/usb/usbip/ and tools/usb/usbip/).

The Linux stuff, but what about the Windows stuff?

Last I checked, there was someone from Eltima Marketing proposing the site be updated with some revenue sharing deal to their proprietary and costly Windows and etc. USB over IP solution.

Also, there were numerous users in their forums posting signed and patched drivers for modern Windows since the ones available for download aren't signed, so I saw.

On the one hand, this looks incredibly cool. On the other hand, I actually find it a bit worrying. With things like BadUSB[1] still out there, I would be worried about anything that gives USB devices more wide reach or higher privileges.

That this project aims to offer "full functionality" of the device, afaik, means it is likely doing exactly the kind of thing that I find worrying. Can anyone talk about this a little more in-depth?

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuruzFqMgIw

Hmm I appreciate more work in this field, especially Windoze compatibility, but... as said in Star Wars: Clone Wars... "Fifty tried, fifty died".

USBoIP is a minefield.

Windows had it first and then it was added to Linux (at least that's what I'm told).

Off-topic: Where in "Star Wars: Clone Wars" is that quote said? I seem to remember Durge boasting something similar, but the only direct references DDG et al. report are from fan-fiction [0], [1], and your comment itself.

(Fanfics not reviewed for Work Safety, caveat lector.)

[0] https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11066605/8/Star-Wars-The-Mandal...

[1] https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9886787/6/Coruscant-School-for-...

This quote comes from the kid living on Iego, where Anakin and Obi-Wan get trapped in a separatist lasernet. IIRC it was the last of the Blue Shadow Virus episodes.

Thank you. For any other searchers, Jaybo [0] says this in Episode 0202 [1] of "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" (not "Star Wars: Clone Wars" - an earlier series, of which I thought my encyclopedic knowledge had failed me, spurring my question).

[0] http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Jaybo_Hood [1] http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Mystery_of_a_Thousand_Moons

This gave me the idea to use my Raspberry pi as a remote hub for Keyboard/Mouse.

Unfortunately, it seems it can't make it working, whether I use the official apt-get binaries, or try to compile myself[1] (either with the version available on sourceforge, or in the linux kernel src).

Anyone who succeed to make this running on Raspberry Pi (Raspbian)? It would be a perfect application!

[1]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=1077...

Can I have the reverse? IP over USB at USB 3.x speeds?

yes on linux(usbnet) at least for a long while, not sure about usb3.x or windows support though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet_over_USB

A quick google showed there are Gigabit NIC over USB3.0 on the market already(for a while): http://www.amazon.com/Network-Adapter-Anker-Ethernet-Support...

I don't want a USB NIC, though, I want just USB to USB with as little shit in between them as possible to be as cheap as possible. Maybe even allow straight DMA to DMA across the machines due to it being USB 3.x.

That's not IP

IP over Firewire and IP over Thunderbolt both explicitly use native DMA to accelerate it. USB only gained DMA in 3.0, and most devices that would greatly benefit from it, don't.

Thunderbolt is much closer to the PCIe bridge/RDMA style interface you seek. Not as ubiquitous or cheap as USB, though.

Yeah, that's 100% of the problem.

Intel refuses to deploy Thunderbolt everywhere, even though I have two Z87/Z97 motherboards with Intel GPU-powered DisplayPort ports and Intel could have trivially baked this into their chipset.

The only computer I have Thunderbolt on? My MBPr. The only computer I don't need a shitton of cheap bandwidth on? My MBPr.

With all the new ultrabook laptops lacking ethernet, this would be awesome!

I would love to see this develop into a widely adopted standard. Apple uses a similar technology with their Airport Express devices for printer sharing, always been annoyed it was so restrictive in being able to connect to it.

I wish I had a million bucks to donate to this project. It could be great, but it's languishing unmaintained on SourceForge.

Side note, can someone please buy me a code-signing certificate?

blocked by uBlock Origin ..

seems the network latency would break the realtime expectations of high data rate USB 3.0 hardware on the USB bus.

and using a still image from a webcam seems like the worst use case... there are much better protocols for serving video streams.

One of the more compelling use-cases for USB over IP is connecting proprietary licensing dongles to virtual machines.

can't you use vt-d and have it passthrough?

That still ties it to a physical VM host doesn't it - what happens if you want to host the VM in a cluster and have it migrate?

You don't even need VT-d for USB devices, only PCI one.

Are those still commonly used?

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