what happens when you plug in a new USB device?

windows macos usb device-driver
Will picture Will · Jun 10, 2010 · Viewed 8.7k times · Source

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)?

Answer

Christopher picture Christopher · Jun 10, 2010

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.

Related questions

Error: ANDROID_HOME is not set and "android" command not in your PATH. You must fulfill at least one of these conditions.

I'm trying to install PhoneGap and I'm getting the following error: Error: ANDROID_HOME is not set and "android" command not in your PATH. You must fulfill at least one of these conditions. Error (screenshot) What do I do to …

Read More
What languages are Windows, Mac OS X and Linux written in?

I was just wondering who knows what programming languages Windows, Mac OS X and Linux are made up from and what languages are used for each part of the OS (ie: Kernel, plug-in architecture, GUI components, etc). I assume that …

Read More
Converting newline formatting from Mac to Windows

I need a conversion utility/script that will convert a .sql dump file generated on Mac to one readable on Windows. This is a continuation of a problem I had here. The issue seems to be with newline formatting in …

Read More