which usb device to use (old kernel)

[Warren Burstein]

I'm trying to set up gnokii.  Unfortunately the linux that I was given to do it on is a Centos 3.4 with a 2.4.21 kernel.  Yes, I know this is ancient (2004) but that's what there is.

There's a Sony Ericsson phone plugged in to a USB port (not on the supported phones list, but I thought it's worth a try), and it shows up in lsusb

$ lsusb

Bus 005 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

Bus 002 Device 002: ID 0fce:e12d Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB

Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000

And there are ttyUSB devices in /dev

$ ls -l /dev/ttyUSB*

crw-rw----    1 root     uucp     188,   0 Sep  9  2004 /dev/ttyUSB0

crw-rw----    1 root     uucp     188,   1 Sep  9  2004 /dev/ttyUSB1

crw-rw----    1 root     uucp     188,  10 Sep  9  2004 /dev/ttyUSB10

crw-rw----    1 root     uucp     188,  11 Sep  9  2004 /dev/ttyUSB11

crw-rw----    1 root     uucp     188,  12 Sep  9  2004 /dev/ttyUSB12

crw-rw----    1 root     uucp     188,  13 Sep  9  2004 /dev/ttyUSB13

crw-rw----    1 root     uucp     188,  14 Sep  9  2004 /dev/ttyUSB14

crw-rw----    1 root     uucp     188,  15 Sep  9  2004 /dev/ttyUSB15

crw-rw----    1 root     uucp     188,   2 Sep  9  2004 /dev/ttyUSB2

crw-rw----    1 root     uucp     188,   3 Sep  9  2004 /dev/ttyUSB3

crw-rw----    1 root     uucp     188,   4 Sep  9  2004 /dev/ttyUSB4

crw-rw----    1 root     uucp     188,   5 Sep  9  2004 /dev/ttyUSB5

crw-rw----    1 root     uucp     188,   6 Sep  9  2004 /dev/ttyUSB6

crw-rw----    1 root     uucp     188,   7 Sep  9  2004 /dev/ttyUSB7

crw-rw----    1 root     uucp     188,   8 Sep  9  2004 /dev/ttyUSB8

crw-rw----    1 root     uucp     188,   9 Sep  9  2004 /dev/ttyUSB9

That's the right major device for the usbserial driver.  I couldn't figure out which of them to use, so I wrote a small C program to try to open each of these, with flags O_RDWR | O_NONBLOCK | O_NOCTTY.  I ran it at superuser.  I thought that whichever port the phone was connected to would open and the others would fail to open.  Unfortunately, I got ENODEV on all ports.  I thought that maybe it might be a higher minor device, so I mknod'd with minor device up to 255 and still they all fail to open, same error code.

I looked in the output of dmesg for lines having to do with usb, there were quite a lot

usb.c: registered new driver usbdevfs

usb.c: registered new driver hub

usb-uhci.c: $Revision: 1.275 $ time 02:04:06 Sep  9 2004

usb-uhci.c: High bandwidth mode enabled

PCI: Setting latency timer of device 00:1d.0 to 64

usb-uhci.c: USB UHCI at I/O 0xc800, IRQ 23

usb-uhci.c: Detected 2 ports

usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1

hub.c: USB hub found

hub.c: 2 ports detected

PCI: Setting latency timer of device 00:1d.1 to 64

usb-uhci.c: USB UHCI at I/O 0xcc00, IRQ 19

usb-uhci.c: Detected 2 ports

usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 2

hub.c: USB hub found

hub.c: 2 ports detected

PCI: Setting latency timer of device 00:1d.2 to 64

usb-uhci.c: USB UHCI at I/O 0xd000, IRQ 18

usb-uhci.c: Detected 2 ports

usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 3

hub.c: USB hub found

hub.c: 2 ports detected

PCI: Setting latency timer of device 00:1d.3 to 64

usb-uhci.c: USB UHCI at I/O 0xd400, IRQ 16

usb-uhci.c: Detected 2 ports

usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 4

hub.c: USB hub found

hub.c: 2 ports detected

usb-uhci.c: v1.275:USB Universal Host Controller Interface driver

PCI: Setting latency timer of device 00:1d.7 to 64

ehci-hcd 00:1d.7: PCI device 8086:265c (Intel Corp.)

ehci-hcd 00:1d.7: irq 23, pci mem f8899c00

usb.c: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 5

ehci-hcd 00:1d.7: enabled 64bit PCI DMA

PCI: 00:1d.7 PCI cache line size set incorrectly (0 bytes) by BIOS/FW.

PCI: 00:1d.7 PCI cache line size corrected to 128.

ehci-hcd 00:1d.7: USB 2.0 enabled, EHCI 1.00, driver 2003-Jan-22

hub.c: USB hub found

hub.c: 8 ports detected

usb.c: registered new driver hiddev

usb.c: registered new driver hid

hid-core.c: v1.8.1 Andreas Gal, Vojtech Pavlik <address@hidden>

hid-core.c: USB HID support drivers

mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice

hub.c: connect-debounce failed, port 1 disabled

hub.c: new USB device 00:1d.1-1, assigned address 2

usb.c: USB device 2 (vend/prod 0xfce/0xe12d) is not claimed by any active driver.

Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...

usb.c: registered new driver usb-storage

scsi2 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices

usb-uhci.c: interrupt, status 3, frame# 906

  Vendor: Sony Eri  Model: Memory Card       Rev: 0000

  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02

I noticed that line saying 'usb.c: USB device 2 (vend/prod 0xfce/0xe12d) is not claimed by any active driver.', that's the same vendor/product displayed by lsusb, and 0xfce is Sony Ericsson's vendor code.  It also seems to have found the memory card on the phone, but I'm not trying to use that.

also at the very end of dmesg's output it said

usb.c: registered new driver serial

usbserial.c: USB Serial support registered for Generic

usbserial.c: USB Serial Driver core v1.4

Poking around the documentation for the kernel, I found in linux-2.4.21/Documentation/usb/usb-serial.txt to pass the vendor and product to an insmod command.  usbserial was already loaded so I did

# rmmod usbserial

# insmod usbserial vendor=0x0fce product=0xe12d

Using /lib/modules/2.4.21-20.EL.c0smp/kernel/drivers/usb/serial/usbserial.o

That added the following lines to the output of dmesg, but still, all 256 ttyUSB ports fail to open with ENODEV.

usbserial.c: USB Serial deregistering driver Generic

usb.c: deregistering driver serial

usb.c: registered new driver serial

usbserial.c: USB Serial support registered for Generic

usbserial.c: USB Serial Driver core v1.4

Should I do something else to locate the correct device?  Do I need to do something else to get the device to work?

thanks