I was talking to my friend today about Parallels

S

Stevamundo

Pro
I told him that I'm so excited about Parallels is coming out with USB 2.0 soon. He was really surprised that currently Parallels only supports 1.1, because most of computers has 2.0. He thinks that upgrading your USB would be fairly easy.

My question is, is it fairly easy to upgrade your USB to 2.0?

BTW, no suggestions on my speakerphone modem problem huh????
 
Last edited:
I'd have to guess that with so many people asking for it, if it were easy, it would have been done by now. And anyway, USB 1.1 or 2.0 isn't the real issue, since the current 1.1 goes as fast as the hardware will go (near 2.0 speed if the device will). The problem is lack of direct passthrough support, which I, for one, am impatiently waiting for.
 
"The problem is lack of direct passthrough support"

Do you mean that the Mac and VM have conflicts because they will use the same USB plug-ins? What do you exactly mean?
 
I would just like to point out, VMWare still has USB 1.1 support only in VMPlayer and VMWorkstation, and I believe VMServer ESX has none at all. VirtualPC has no USB support at all (it treats mice and kboards as PS/2 devices, but won't see other USB devices).

So if Parallels supports USB2 soon, I'll be impressed.
 
Stevamundo said:
"The problem is lack of direct passthrough support"

Do you mean that the Mac and VM have conflicts because they will use the same USB plug-ins? What do you exactly mean?
Click to expand...
No, I mean that Parallels has to look at the USB data stream and pass all the bits that come from a device the user has selected as belonging to the guest on to the guest, and all the bits the guest tries to send to the device to the device without emulating anything. The mouse and keyboard have to be emulated because they are shared, but it should be possible to attach a USB device to the guest for exclusive use by the guest and the guest should see all the bits so it can't tell it isn't running on the hardware.

This would solve lots of problems, including DVD burning to an external device, and I'm waiting for it with baited breath.
 
I'm not sure how Parallels will implement it but don't forget about the plug-n-play stuff...

Effectively if I were the developer I would see two problems:

1) You have to write code to effectively steal the USB ports from Mac OS. This means getting completely around any built in OS plug-n-play. Not a trivial task I would think.

2) To support 2.0 speeds you would have to represent the new USB device to Windows and make it look exactly like a USB 2.0 device.

In effect you would be routing it direct into Windows while bypassing all OS X plug-n-play and doing all of this in a way that doesn't effect speed. Again, not a trivial task.

I think Parallels will do it but it will be impressive. Frankly I think what Parallels is doing already is pretty amazing. So far WinXP runs everything I've thrown at it at speeds that rival boot camp yet at moments notice I can click over to OS X. Frankly that is something in my eyes!

As a Windows bio-medical software developer we've looked at using USB devices. IE we have a large machine that transmits data over RS-485 lines to small peripherials. Sometimes we want to sniff the data traffic.

The best way to do this was to provide software and a laptop that could "plug in" to the 485 net and sniff the packets. With laptops coming without serial ports we decided to give USB a try.

It presented a number of problems:

1) No direct USB support in our compiler. We had to buy a development kit. We chose the cheap route of not trying to obtain true plug-n-play with our device. It is sort of a nightmare to get it found and registered by our software.

2) We had to buy a USB device driver. True we could have written one but no one on our team had direct expertise doing that and the time / money was not worth it when we could buy one for about $1500. Seems expensive though especially when I can directly open a TCP/IP or Serial port in my base compiler.

Because of these difficulties our director of SW put the kabosh on further USB development and switched us to TCP/IP. We duplicated the USB product to be a TCP/IP based product. IE you plug it into the RS-485, plug the other end into your laptop TCP/IP port, connect to the device and talk. Simple, fast, easy... Plus we were able to extend the device and use it for remote monitoring.

Hence I'm not a huge fan of USB. Frankly I think it is overrated and unfortunately MANY MANY devices are out there pretty much guaranteeing that we will see it for years to come.

Mark
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top