Coming Soon: USBLAN - NDIS 6.3 Implementation

NDIS (Network Driver Interface Specification) is the Windows networking stack and implements the Windows Networking interfaces with all associated networking protocols such as IPv4, IPv6, UDP, TCP etc.


NDIS 6.3  is the version of the (NDIS) library included with the Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 operating systems.  To support the new Windows 8 features, Belcarra’s USBLAN driver has been updated to compile with the new Windows 8 SDK. 

Please contact us for additional information.

USB TestDrive - Panda


Introduction

For some time now Belcarra has made available a USB test package system for the Gumstix Overo Earth and related boards. This package is ultimately based on the Angstrom system.

The goal of Testdrive Panda is to extend the project to newer systems using the TI Pandaboard. The decision was made to use Ubuntu instead of Angstrom because it’s possible to put a complete development system on board the distribution -- so if you want to test with an additional tool -- just load it on the board either with the package manager or in the worst case build it from source, all on the board, no cross-compilation needed.

However, another goal of the effort was to make this mostly unnecessary. For example, the standard network performance tool iperf is not part of the Ubuntu distro that we used, but we added a source for iperf to the package manager’s source list.

In addition to this, we customized the distro to use a more recent Linux kernel  with a customized configuration streamlined for USB testing.

Acquiring and Installing TestDrive-Panda

Testdrive Panda Features

Testdrive Panda is built on the Precise 10 Ubuntu distribution with some small customizations.

  • The language is specified as English and date format is US English
  • A custom Linux kernel rather that the one supplied in Precise 10, although the the original kernel is available
  • Text-based operation only -- via the serial port or via ssh
  • Simple scripts to load ECM NCM EEM modes with specified VID/PID pairs (Gadget)
  • iperf available (see above)
  • quick boot
  • a special user user called testdrive with no password that is in the sudo group --  and therefore has root privilege via the sudo command.


Installation steps

The steps below refer to various scripts, which are available separately from the TestDrive distro itself  in an SD tools package.

Acquire an SD card
The first install step is to get a new SD card, or one that can be reused.  The size should be 4GB or larger

What's new in 2.4.2

USBLAN 2.4.2 is now available from Windows Update by using vid/pid 15ec/d031

This new release includes support for:
  • USB 3 - INF match implemented
  • IOCTL feature - For all protocols an IOCTL that can be used to make a list of attached devices, along with the any of the following information for each USBLAN device attached
    • - VID
    • - PID
    • - Manufacturer name 
    • - Product Name
    • - Serial Number
    • - DHCP host IP
    • - DHCP device 
  •  MaxTransferSend/MaxTransferRecv - registry entries which tweak the send or receive strategy for RNDIS, EEM or NCM
  • jumbo frames

Jumbo Frames

The CDC-ECM protocol (and other networking over USB protocols) describe procedures to transport 802.3-like frames over USB. Standard physical Ethernet frames have an MTU (maximum transfer unit) of 1500 bytes, but there is no such limitation in USB. USB transfers can be up to 64KB in size.

In the world of physical Ethernets, Gigabit Ethernets also see the 1500 limit as insufficient, and so there is provision in the network stacks of Windows, (embedded) Linux and other operating systems for jumbo frames. The actual MTU is a property of the network card and its driver. There is a procedure for two ends of an Ethernet link to discover the actual MTU in effect.

The Gadget implementation of CDC-ECM (the g_ether module) can be readily patched to support larger MTU’s.

Read more »

ReDirection Service

Data Collection and Forwarding Overview

http://www.prweb.com/releases/2012/4/prweb9361487.htm 

Small devices have a need to connect to Cloud based servers to deliver data for compilation, processing and use from Web Based applications. While more expensive devices may use WiFi (or Ethernet) to achieve this purpose, low end devices can use Networking over USB to accomplish this task at a lower cost by simply tethering the device to a desktop system.
Read more »

USB TestDrive

Belcarra’s USB TestDrive is a Linux Environment based on the Gumstix Overo hardware development system that uses TI’s OMAP 3530 SOC. The TestDrive system can be used to evaluate USB Networking protocols and implementations such as:
• Linux Gadget g-ether network and filestorage function drivers.
• Belcarra CDC-NCM, EEM, ECM and mass storage function drivers.
• Belcarra’s USBLAN class driver for Microsoft Windows.

The TestDrive kit is complete with ROOTFS, Compiled 2.6.34 kernel and script to create an SD card to boot the Overo device.
Network test tools are installed and ready to use as soon as the system boots. Gadget or Belcarra modules can be loaded and unloaded for testing with a simple shell script.
For more information:  http://link.belcarra.com/TestDriveOverview