Overview

Belcarra supports an environment for testing USB Networking protocols. This paper is the first in a series and will provide an overview of this environment which includes both USB Host and USB Device side software components.

Belcarra’s Overo USB TestDrive is a Linux based test system based on the Gumstix Overo board. The Overo board is a low cost hardware development system using a Texas Instruments OMAP series of System On Chip (SOC) technology.  It supports USB 2.0 for both host and client implementations.

Introduction

The TestDrive system can be used to test and evaluate various USB Networking protocols:

• Gadget based network and filestorage function drivers
• Belcarra based network and mass storage function drivers
• Belcarra Windows USBLAN class driver

The USB TestDrive kit contains:

• Overo ROOTFS
• Compiled Linux kernel and modules
• script to create an SD card to boot an Overo

Network test tools include:

• wget / wput
• iperf
• apache
• ping (normal and flood ping)
• pingall

Currently the following USB protocols are supported:

• Network protocols

• CDC-ECM
• CDC-EEM
• RNDIS * (gadget only)
• CDC-NCM

• Mass Storage (Bulk only)

All of the CDC protocols can be tested against Windows systems (10, 8.1, 7) using an evaluation version of Belcarra’s Windows USBLAN v2.4 driver available from Windows Update.

The Overo kernel and root filesystem is setup with the following:

• The 2.6.34 kernel (this is the first kernel to have proper CDC-EEM support in the Gadget subsystem)
• Belcarra USB peripheral modules
• Gadget modules
• Network test tools 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

Setting USB options can be done by passing arguments to the module loading scripts:

• Networking protocol - CDC-ECM, CDC-EEM, CDC-NCM, Mass Storage
• USB Vendor and Product ID’s

Note that both Gadget and Belcarra’s USB stack implement Composite devices. Some variations of these can also be tested:

• Network / Mass Storage
• Network / Serial
• Network / Serial / Mass Storage

Getting the kit

The kit can be downloaded from the https://downloads.belcarra.com/

.

The Belcarra Linux kernel is available from github with the following:

git clone belcarraovero.github.com/linux-overo-2.6.34.git

Belcarra’s Composite USB stack is available separately. Contact info@belcarra.com

Additional  Documentation

• Windows USB TestDrive Setup - an overview of setting up a Microsoft Windows system to do testing of USB devices with tools such as Apache and Cygwin.

• Overo USB TestDrive Setup - an overview of USB Device testing using Belcarra’s Overo USB Test Environment

• USBLAN for Windows 2.4 OEM Manual - Link to download a .pdf with technical details of architecture, configuration, customization and debug scenarios for USBLAN release 2.4.
• Installing and using TestDrive-Panda - This paper explains the Testdrive PandaBoard distribution (available here), how to install it and how to use it.
• USBLAN for Microchip PIC32 Network over USB Demonstration