BSOD with USB device

[todd]

I have a USB device (a Nintendo DS development system) that I wish to use in parallels; it's the whole reason we bought parallels, actually. The DS box attaches via USB, and you upload binaries to the box for execution.

On stock Windows XP, this works fine. On the same version of XP under parallels (Linux 2.6.16.19 host, XP SP2 guest), with an identical toolchain and software, I get a blue screen of death.

This is a fairly high priority problem for us. If we don't solve it relatively soon, we'll have to drop parallels. We were hoping to migrate all our dev boxes to Parallels (it would make things much nicer for us, for a whole variety of reasons), but we don't have very long to decide whether it's working or not.

The machine in question:

Processor: Intel Pentium D 930
Motherboard: ASUS P5LD2
RAM: 4G
Hard Disk: 300G SATA
Host OS: Linux 2.6.16.19 kernel on Gentoo 2006.0
Guest OS: Windows XP SP2 + "automatic updates"

 

[todd]

After playing with the source of the uploader, I'm coming to the conclusion that the USB stack in Parallels is fairly fragile. I'm sure I've tickled several different bugs, depending on how I configure the uploader. The problems:

- With a large upload buffer (256K), the upload program wedges, and killing it results in a BSOD.
- An upload buffer of 4K causes immediate BSOD.
- A buffer in the range of 128 bytes to 1K works, the upload completes, and then BSOD when
the uploader terminates.

It's also a USB2 machine plugged into a USB2 port, but being forced to USB1 speeds by parallels, so there could be issues there as well.

The BSODs are different at different times. I've had both address errors and BUGCODE_USB_DRIVER bluescreens.

I particularly enjoy how Windows is "shutting down to avoid damaging my computer" according to these screens.

At any rate, I can't afford to screw around with this much longer.