Sign Up to our social questions and Answers Engine to ask questions, answer people’s questions, and connect with other people.
Login to our social questions & Answers Engine to ask questions answer people’s questions & connect with other people.
Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.
Please briefly explain why you feel this question should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this answer should be reported.
Please briefly explain why you feel this user should be reported.
I have an embedded device with a USB connection. When the user plugs the device into their PC (Windows, OSX), how does the operating system discover what drivers to install? How do I get my drivers to be selected? Can they reside on some central server (run by the OS vendor)?
This is for Windows :
When a USB device is plugged into the system, the USB bus driver is notified.
The bus driver sends a standard USB request (USB_DEVICE_DESCRIPTOR) to the device. With this the device reports its name and type. (bDeviceClass/bDeviceSubClass/bDeviceProtocol).
With this information, Windows creates an device entry in the system. This the Hardware-ID. The system now tries to find either a generic driver which can handle the device (HID/UVC) or a driver which specifically registered itself to support this Hardware-ID.
To register a driver as the handler for a specific device, you have to install the driver into the system, or you must supply Microsoft with one, which they can provide on their servers.