Introduction

Introduction

The eCos USB-Serial package provides additional support for USB peripherals that look like a serial port to the host. These can follow the ACM communication device specification or simpler devices which just have two bulk endpoints. Microsoft Windows requires ACM mode. Linux should operate with both modes, however ACM may cause problems since the eCos driver does not implement all the class descriptors, so generic mode is recommended.

The USB-Serial package is not tied to any specific hardware. It requires the presence of USB hardware on the target and a suitable device driver to make endpoints available for this code to use. The configuration system cannot load the eCos package automatically for specific targets, in the way that a USB device driver or an ethernet driver can be loaded automatically. Instead, the package has to be added explicitly. When using the command line tools this will involve an operation like the following:

        $ ecosconfig add usbs_serial
      

Typically, this will automatically cause the USB device driver to become active.