OpenBSD Journal

How to add support for a USB stick

Contributed by jl on from the hello-is-this-the-support-dept? dept.

Do you have a lot of USB sticks that don't work in OpenBSD? Perhaps you have some USB stick that don't get attached upon boot? Here's your chance to learn a little bit about how you can add support for some of these devices.

The idea is that some of the USB sticks out there have a working driver in OpenBSD however the driver hasn't always been updated to recognize the manufacturer ID of your particular piece of hardware. Dmitri Alenitchev has a brief two part (1 2) tutorial describing how you can fix these kinds of problems all on your own.

If you get a USB device working properly, please don't keep it to yourself, email what you did, what you have, and diffs to tech@openbsd.org. Of course test it thoroughly first, and on multiple systems if you have them.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Anonymous Coward (24.37.242.64) on

    Cool! I didn't know about this. From doing this, can we submit them somewhere too?

    Comments
    1. By Marc Balmer (2001:8a8:1001:0:216:76ff:fe72:356c) mbalmer@openbsd.org on

      > Cool! I didn't know about this. From doing this, can we submit them somewhere too?

      If you successfully make work a USB device following Dmitri's advice, I suggest that you send a unified diff against OpenBSD -current to tech@. Make sure you are running -current, since all development is done in -current.

  2. By Anonymous Coward (69.28.228.76) on

    I agree, this is a pretty cool HOWTO. I'm still afraid to actually plug any such device into my 4.2 box, since the last time I did this it crashed the box hard.

    Comments
    1. By Igor Sobrado (sobrado) sobrado@ on

      It should not happen. However, no one will be able to help you without a detailed description of the problem. Please, see http://openbsd.org/report.html

  3. By Anonymous Coward (216.68.198.1) on

    USB flash works great with FFS instead of MSDOS. Long filenames sure helps. Performance is good. Some USB sticks have died though, unknown why, if FFS or if should use different options.
    Hasn't been enough die fast enough to be an issue. Just about 1 year, with only, ~3X copy/delete of size of stick. Do USB sticks age poorly, like 2 years with rare use.
    My SanDisk 256M and 512M have lasted way beyond others, as well as Lexas 1G sticks.
    My SanDisk 1G didn't last very long. Was some other 256M that died, but I through it away.
    Hope any data helps people out.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (72.65.216.34) on

      > USB flash works great with FFS instead of MSDOS.

      But putting FFS on a USB stick sort of defeats the purpose of a USB stick, since FFS can only be read by computers running OpenBSD. If you want to read your data from other operating systems, then MSDOS is the only real option.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (24.37.242.64) on

        > > USB flash works great with FFS instead of MSDOS.
        >
        > But putting FFS on a USB stick sort of defeats the purpose of a USB stick, since FFS can only be read by computers running OpenBSD. If you want to read your data from other operating systems, then MSDOS is the only real option.

        I use some for minor backups, but also tar over ssh too. Other systems I boot OpenBSD off of USB and load everything into a MFS, with root as read-only. No flashdist or flashboot, just custom made scripts or by hand running -stable.

        So in essence, there is good uses for FFS on flash. :)

        Comments
        1. By lawrence hordy (lawrephord) lawrephord@lycos.com on lawrephord antiqueoperatingsytems

          people have formated the usb for dual/multiple boot drives !
          a few get an unformat file area !
          some get a mirror file !
          CONSIDER A 8 OR 16 G SPLIT FOR TO BOOT 8 EIGHT OPERATING SYSTEMS !

          > > > USB flash works great with FFS instead of MSDOS.
          > >
          > > But putting FFS on a USB stick sort of defeats the purpose of a USB stick, since FFS can only be read by computers running OpenBSD. If you want to read your data from other operating systems, then MSDOS is the only real option.
          >
          > I use some for minor backups, but also tar over ssh too. Other systems I boot OpenBSD off of USB and load everything into a MFS, with root as read-only. No flashdist or flashboot, just custom made scripts or by hand running -stable.
          >
          > So in essence, there is good uses for FFS on flash. :)

      2. By Brynet (Brynet) on

        > But putting FFS on a USB stick sort of defeats the purpose of a USB stick, since FFS can only be read by computers running OpenBSD. If you want to read your data from other operating systems, then MSDOS is the only real option.

        Well, If the person only has systems running OpenBSD - That won't be an issue, now will it? ;)

        It should be possible to mount a FFS file system on all of the BSD's, I doubt their implementations vary by much.

        Comments
        1. By Sunnz (sunnz) on http://yius.id.au

          > It should be possible to mount a FFS file system on all of the BSD's, I doubt their implementations vary by much.

          I don't know if the implementation vary that much, but enough to the point that it doesn't work with 'different' OpenBSD platforms.

          For example when I formatted my USB in FFS on my OpenBSD MacPPC box, it won't mount on my OpenBSD AMD64 box. They are both 4.2-release fresh install. The MacPPC's FFS stores data in big-endian and AMD64 stores in little-endian... or is it the other way around? Either way it just won't work... and I believe I ended up using ext2.

        2. By Anonymous Coward (129.27.44.226) on

          > > But putting FFS on a USB stick sort of defeats the purpose of a USB stick, since FFS can only be read by computers running OpenBSD. If you want to read your data from other operating systems, then MSDOS is the only real option.
          >
          > Well, If the person only has systems running OpenBSD - That won't be an issue, now will it? ;)

          I use FFS on an external USB harddrive, because I use it almost exclusively on OpenBSD. There is a Windows driver that works fine, just read-only. But that's all I need anyway.

          http://ffsdrv.sourceforge.net/

          Of course, if your primary goal for the device is to make exchanging files as painless as possible across a multitude of platforms, FAT32 is probably the most widely supported filesystem.

  4. By lawrence hordy (lawrephord) lawrephord@lycos.com on lawrephord

    multiple boot format 1 cpm/80 32MEG
    .....................2 cmp/86 32MEG
    .....................3 cpm/plus 32MEG
    .....................4 msdos 3.1 32MEG
    .....................5 msdos 3.3 32MEG
    .....................6 msdos 3.5 32MEG
    .....................7 msdos 6.22 512MEG
    .....................8 w95 512MEG
    .....................9 w98 512MEG
    .....................10 w xp UNDER 1G
    .....................11 w vista UNDER 1G
    .....................12 QNX UNDER 1G
    .....................13 linux UNDER 1G
    .....................14 B S D 5G

  5. By Anonymous Coward (85.178.120.161) on

    Cool! If such things could get done (the howto) for f.e. WLAN Cards as well or so please say so.

    Also this may should get included into the FAQ because people don't always look at undeadly-Archives!

    Good thing! :)

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