USB devices have been a mainstay of extending x86 systems for some time now. At Joyent, we used USB keys to contain our own version of iPXE to boot. As part of discussions around RFD 77 Hardware-backed per-zone crypto tokens with Alex Wilson we talked about knowing and constricting which USB devices were trusted based on whether or not they were plugged into an internal USB port or external USB port.
While this wasn’t the first time that this idea had come up, by the time I started working on ideas on improving data center management, having better USB topology ended up on the list of problems I wanted to solve in RFD 89 Project Tiresias. Though at that point, how it was going to work was still a bit of an unknown.
The rest of this blog entry will focus on giving a bit of background on how USB works, some of the building blocks used for topology, examples of how we use the topology information, and then how to flesh it out for a new system.
USB Background
While USB, the Universal Serial Bus, is rather ubiquitous, some of its underlying implementation may not be. This section describes USBv1, v2, and v3 devices. The USBv4 spec is basically Thunderbolt, which is a different enough beast that I don’t want to lump it into here.
Every USB device is plugged into a device called a hub. Each hub consists of one or more ports and may itself be plugged into another hub. In this manner, you can think of USB like a tree. When you get to the root of this tree, you reach what is called the root hub. The root hub is often a bit different from the other hubs — it bridges USB to the rest of the system. Most USB root hubs are either built into the platform’s chipsets or they are on external PCI express cards. The operating system interfaces with these devices generally using standards like xHCI, the eXtensible Host Controller Interface (they already used the E for EHCI – the Enhanced Host Controller Interface).
USB 2.0 and USB 3.x Compatibility
There are many versions of USB devices out on the market; however, even newer devices work on older systems (if you can find the right kind of plug). The secret to this is that every USB 3.x port must support USB 2.0. The way this works is that a USB 3.x port has the wiring for both USB 3.x and USB 2.0 at the same time. In general, this has been a good thing. It means that older devices will work on newer systems and newer devices will work on older systems albeit not always at the maximum speed that they support. However, this does make our life a bit more complicated when it comes to topology.
While a single physical port can support both USB 3.x and USB 2.0, to the operating system the one physical port shows up as two different logical ports on the host controller. Generally, a device will select either USB 3.x or USB 2.0 signaling based on what they support and therefore it will only show up on one of the two logical ports. However, when it comes to topology, the user cares only about the fact that it’s in a given physical port, they don’t (generally speaking) care about the fact that there are multiple logical ports.
USB hubs, which allow for more devices to exist, are an exception to the rule of only using USB 3.x or USB 2.0 signaling. A USB 3.x hub is actually two hubs in one! When a USB 3.x hub is plugged into a port that supports USB 3.x, it will enumerate as two different hubs: one on the USB 2.0 logical port and one on the USB 3.x logical port. This means that the OS will actually see two distinct USB Hubs that it will enumerate and manage independently.
Ultimately, these are all good properties for USB devices to have. It does mean that we have to do a bit more work to map everything together, but that’s fine — that’s our job.
Multiple Host Controllers
The picture we painted above is a nice one, but doesn’t reflect all systems. One of the challenges of USB 3.0 support was that it introduced a new host controller interface: xhci replaced ehci. Now, to help with the transition, Intel produced a number of chipsets that had both xhci and ehci controllers on them. When the system booted up, all of the USB ports would be directed towards the ehci controller. However, on these platforms an xhci device driver could write to a special register which would result in rerouting all of the ports from the ehci controller to the xhci controller.
This allowed operating systems which didn’t support xhci to still have working USB. On Intel platforms, this duality was removed with Intel’s Intel’s Skylake chipsets.
From topology’s perspective, this means that the same physical port could show up not just as two different ports on the same controller, but actually as multiple, disjoint ports on different controllers!
Companion Controllers
With USB 3.x, a single host controller can support USB 3.x, 2.0, and 1.x devices. However, before USB 3.0 this wasn’t the case. Instead, platforms placed what was called a ‘companion controller’ on the motherboard. The basic idea was that the USB 2.0 ports were wired up to one controller and the other ports were wired up to a companion USB 1.0/USB 1.1 controller (ohci or uhci).
The companion controller model required the various drivers to be aware of this reality and trade things back and forth between them. Folding them together in xhci made things simpler. From a topology perspective, this can result in the same problem hat we have in the pre-Skylake USB 3.0 supporting systems — a given physical port can show up under multiple distinct devices.
USB Descriptors and Capabilities
Information about USB devices is broken down into two different groups of information:
- Descriptors
- Capabilities
Descriptors are used to identify information about the device such as the manufacturer ID, the device ID, the USB revision the device supports, etc.. There are descriptors which identify characteristics about a shared class of devices and others which identify information about different configurations that the device supports. For the purposes of USB topology, we primarily care about the device descriptor.
USB capabilities are stored in what’s called the binary object store. Capabilities first showed up in the USB 3.0 specification (though they appeared first in the briefly used Wireless USB specification). These capabilities are required for devices and generally describe USB-wide aspects of the device.
Topology Building Blocks
USB Topology is complicated for a few different reasons. The first is the fact a single physical port can show up as two different logical ports to the operating system. The second challenge is actually figuring out what all the ports are used for — if they’re used at all.
This second problem deserves a bit more explanation. Most systems have USB support from their platform chipset. The platform chipset implements a number of USB ports. For example, let’s look at one of the Intel 300 series chipsets, the Z390. If you look at the I/O specifications, it lists that it supports 14 USB ports, all of which can support USB 2.0 and some of which can support different forms of USB 3.1. Now, the standard system doesn’t actually have 14 USB ports all wired up, only a subset of them. Even the mobile chipsets are the same and I certainly don’t have 14 USB ports all over my laptop. This means that there are ports that the OS can see, but may not be used or wired up at all. Or they may be wired up to an internal hub.
While this is a challenge, it is surmountable. We’ll talk about a few of the things we can use to map ports together and a few things that also don’t work for us.
ACPI
ACPI, the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface, provides a multitude of different capabilities to the system. However, there are a few that are specific to USB that are useful for us.
In ACPI, there is a notion of a tree of devices. Every device in the tree has properties and methods that the operating system can read and invoke which are provided by the platform firmware. When the operating system is looking for devices, it searches for ACPI devices in the same way it might search for PCI devices. In this tree, we’ll find three different relevant items: PCI devices, USB hubs, and USB ports. A USB host controller will be represented as a PCI device and it will have a child device, which is a USB hub, representing the root hub that the operating system sees. The hub will then have a port entry that corresponds to each logical port that the USB device has. If the platform has other hubs built into it (not ones that a user a plugs in), then they might also be represented in the ACPI tree.
For each port in the tree, there are three attributes that we care about. The first is the _ADR
method. It is a generic ACPI method that determines the address of a given object. The type of address will vary based on the type of the device. A PCI device would have its device and function number while a SATA device would have the port number. In the case of a USB port, it gives us the port number on the hub which corresponds to the logical view that the operating system will see. This gives us a way of correlating the ACPI port objects with the ports that the operating system sees.
The next thing that we use from ACPI is the optional _UPC
method, which is used to return the USB port capabilities. It tells us two different types of information:
- Whether a device may be connected to the port or not.
- The type of USB port. For example, whether it’s a Type A or Type C connector.
The next piece that we use is the _PLD
method, which is the physical location of device. This method returns a binary description of the physical device information. It includes some information like the panel, orientation, and more. While theoretically useful, in practice, the binary payload makes it hard to really deterministically say something useful about the layout of the ports.
Now, you may ask if it’s hard to make something sensible about it, then why bother using it at all. The answer to that lies in the xHCI specification. The xHCI specification says that if you want to map two physical ports on an xhci controller together — such as a USB 2 port and its corresponding USB 3 port, then you can actually use the physical location of device information to map them together. If two ports, have the same panel, horizontal and vertical position, shape, group orientation, position, and token, then they are the same port. This only works across a single controller. Unfortunately, you cannot map two ports together on different controllers this way.
Exposing Information
For each USB root controller and its corresponding ports, we end up creating a logical device node for it in the devices tree. ACPI devices are rooted under the fw
node. Each USB root hub shows up under it with a way to map it to its corresponding PCI device. Under each hub is a port, and if there’s a hub under that, then another USB hub and its ports.
Each port has a series of properties that correspond to the various ACPI methods discussed above. More specifically, we have the following properties:
acpi-address
: The value of the address found through the_ADR
method.acpi-physical-location
: A byte array that corresponds to the raw ACPI values. The kernel does not try to interpret the data and instead that is done in user land.usb-port-connectable
: A property that if present indicates that the port is connectable.usb-port-type
: A property that indicates the ACPI USB port type.
These properties can all be read with the libdevinfo(3LIB) library, which allows software to take a snapshot of the tree, walk the various nodes, and read the properties of the different nodes.
A Building Block Not Taken: SMBIOS
SMBIOS, is the system management BIOS. It provides tables of static information about the system. For example, lists of CPUs, memory devices, and more. One of the things I’ve enjoyed doing in illumos is keeping this information up to date and improving it as new releases of the specification come out. It’s proven to be invaluable for other efforts like labeling PCIe devices.
This time though, I mention SMBIOS because it’s something that one might normally think to use, but actually doesn’t work. One of the SMBIOS tables is a list of ports and what they connect to. Unfortunately, the SMBIOS tables usually refer to USB ports based on the headers on the motherboard. While this can be useful for some cases, it isn’t for what we care about — mapping ports that you plug devices into back to the corresponding ports that the operating systems see.
Enumerating USB Topology
With the different building blocks in place, let’s turn directions and now look at how we expose all of this information in the FMA topology trees. We’ll first look at what we expose and then we’ll come back and explain how that’s put together in FMA. We enumerate USB ports in FMA’s topology in three different groups:
- USB ports that we know correspond to the chassis
- USB ports that come from a PCIe add on card.
- All the remaining USB ports, which we place off of the motherboard.
For each port, we list the following information:
- The USB revisions the port supports, such as 2.0, 3.0, etc.
- The type of the port if we have ACPI information or a metadata file to tell us about it.
- Whether we consider the port connectable, visible, or disconnected.
- Information about whether we consider the port internal or external, if we have explicit metadata.
- A list of all of the logical ports this physical port represents. For example, if a port is wired up to an ehci controller and two ports on an xhci controller (one for USB 2.0 and one for USB 3.x), then we’ll list three different children here.
- A label that describes the port, if metadata provides it. This is a string that a person uses to know how to identify a port. For example, ‘Rear Upper Left USB’.
The following is an example of what a single USB port node might look like in fmtopo
:
hc://:product-id=Joyent-S10G5:server-id=magma:chassis-id=S287161X8300740/chassis=0/port=0
group: protocol version: 1 stability: Private/Private
resource fmri hc://:product-id=Joyent-S10G5:server-id=magma:chassis-id=S287161X8300740/chassis=0/port=0
FRU fmri hc://:product-id=Joyent-S10G5:server-id=magma:chassis-id=S287161X8300740/chassis=0
label string Rear Upper Left USB
group: authority version: 1 stability: Private/Private
product-id string Joyent-S10G5
chassis-id string S287161X8300740
server-id string magma
group: port version: 1 stability: Private/Private
type string usb
group: usb-port version: 1 stability: Private/Private
port-type string USB 3 Standard-A connector
usb-versions string[] [ "2.0" "3.0" ]
port-attributes string[] [ "user-visible" "external-port" ]
logical-ports string[] [ "xhci0@2" "xhci0@18" ]
Under a port, if a USB device is plugged in, we’ll list information about the device. This includes:
- The USB revision of the device. For example, this could be 1.1, 2.0, 2.1, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, etc..
- The numeric vendor and device identifiers, which are used to inform the system about the device so the right driver can be attached.
- The revision ID of the device. This is a vendor-specific name.
- The device’s USB vendor and product name strings, if it provides them.
- The USB device’s serial number, if it has one.
- The speed of the device, for example super-speed, full-speed, etc.. These represent the type of protocol speed that the system has.
Next, we’ll create a set of properties that describe the driver that’s attached to the device, if any. This is a standard property group that you’ll find on other nodes in the tree, such as a PCIe device. This includes:
- The name of the driver.
- The instance of the driver (a logical construct in the OS).
- The path of the driver in /devices.
- The module information for the driver, such as its FMRI (fault management resource identifier).
Here’s an example of the information for a device itself in fmtopo
:
hc://:product-id=Joyent-S10G5:server-id=magma:chassis-id=S287161X8300740:serial=00241D8CE563C1B1E94FEBB4:part=DataTraveler-2.0:revision=100/motherboard=0/port=5/usb-device=0
group: protocol version: 1 stability: Private/Private
resource fmri hc://:product-id=Joyent-S10G5:server-id=magma:chassis-id=S287161X8300740:serial=00241D8CE563C1B1E94FEBB4:part=DataTraveler-2.0:revision=100/motherboard=0/port=5/usb-device=0
FRU fmri hc://:product-id=Joyent-S10G5:server-id=magma:chassis-id=S287161X8300740:serial=00241D8CE563C1B1E94FEBB4:part=DataTraveler-2.0:revision=100/motherboard=0/port=5/usb-device=0
label string Internal USB
group: authority version: 1 stability: Private/Private
product-id string Joyent-S10G5
chassis-id string S287161X8300740
server-id string magma
group: usb-properties version: 1 stability: Private/Private
usb-port uint32 0xa
usb-vendor-id int32 2352
usb-product-id int32 25924
usb-revision-id string 100
usb-version string 2.0
usb-vendor-name string Kingston
usb-product-name string DataTraveler 2.0
usb-serialno string 00241D8CE563C1B1E94FEBB4
usb-speed string high-speed
group: io version: 1 stability: Private/Private
driver string scsa2usb
instance uint32 0x0
devfs-path string /pci@0,0/pci15d9,981@14/storage@a
module fmri mod:///mod-name=scsa2usb/mod-id=110
group: binding version: 1 stability: Private/Private
occupant-path string /pci@0,0/pci15d9,981@14/storage@a/disk@0,0
Finally, based on the kind of device we encounter, we might enumerate children nodes. Right now there are two cases that we’ll enumerate child nodes:
- If we encounter a hub and we have found its children, then we’ll enumerate them as we described above and any USB devices that we find under them.
- If we encounter a USB device that represents a disk, like an external hard drive or USB key, then we’ll set some additional properties on the node and call into the disk enumerator. This’ll create a disk node that can be used to map disk information back to the physical device.
Other Uses
While having the items in the tree makes it easier for us to see everything in the system, once we have location information and serial numbers, there are other ways we can use this. The tool diskinfo
lists disks and, when we have it, the physical location of them and their serial number. For example, when using SATA and SAS drives, this can tell you which drive bay they’re in, whether it’s a front or rear drive, and more.
To get this information, the diskinfo
program takes a snapshot of the system topology and then maps the discovered disks to the corresponding disk nodes in the system’s topology. We’ve done the same for these USB devices. So if we have topology information, we can tell you which USB device it is that’s plugged in. For example:
# diskinfo -P
DISK VID PID SERIAL FLT LOC LOCATION
c1t0d0 Kingston DataTraveler 2.0 00241D8CE563C1B1E94FEBB4 - - Internal USB
c2t5000CCA0496FCA6Dd0 HGST HUSMH8010BSS204 0HWZGX6A no no [0] Slot00
c2t5000CCA25319F125d0 HGST HUH721212AL4200 8DGG88SZ no no [0] Slot01
c2t5000CCA25318BE1Dd0 HGST HUH721212AL4200 8DGELUWZ no no [0] Slot02
c2t5000CCA2530F9CD5d0 HGST HUH721212AL4200 8DG8L5JZ no no [0] Slot03
c2t5000CCA25318BE15d0 HGST HUH721212AL4200 8DGELUUZ no no [0] Slot04
...
Constructing Topology
Now that we’ve talked about how we use topology and most of the operating system building blocks, it’s worth spending some time talking about how we actually build the USB topology itself.
We gather data from three different sources:
- A USB topology metadata file.
- Walking the devices tree looking for USB root hubs and their children (non-ACPI).
- Walking the ACPI firmware tree, looking for USB information.
Once we gather information from all three of these sources, we combine them all together to create a single, coherent map. We first map an ACPI node to its corresponding devcfg node. Then, if we’ve opted to map ports together based on ACPI (more on that in a little bit), then we’ll combine the different logical nodes together.
USB Metadata File
The topology USB metadata file allows us to create a per-vendor, per-product map of additional information. The file is a simple format that has keywords and arguments.
A file first identifies a given port. From a port, it will then provide additional metadata such as a label and whether or not it is internal or external. Next, if we need to override the ACPI port type either because it’s missing or incorrect, then we can do so here. Finally, a series of ACPI paths that describe the port are listed. This way, when a port has a USB 2.0 and a USB 3.x component, because we’ve listed both, we’ll be able to apply this metadata to either port.
Finally, there are a number of top-level directives. These describe the matching behavior that we’d like to use. We can do the following:
- Disable the use of ACPI entirely on this platform.
- Disable the use of ACPI matching. We’ve done this on platforms where we’ve determined that the ACPI information that the platform has is incorrect.
- We can enable matching based on the metadata information. This is useful in tandem with the above. Here, we use the ACPI paths to perform matching the same way that we did elsewhere.
Here’s a portion of a USB metadata file:
port
label
Rear Lower Right USB
chassis
external
port-type
0x3
acpi-path
\_SB_.PCI0.XHCI.RHUB.HS11
acpi-path
\_SB_.PCI0.XHCI.RHUB.SSP2
acpi-path
\_SB_.PCI0.EHC2.HUBN.PR01.PR15
end-port
port
label
Internal USB
internal
port-type
0x3
acpi-path
\_SB_.PCI0.XHCI.RHUB.HS07
acpi-path
\_SB_.PCI0.XHCI.RHUB.SSP4
acpi-path
\_SB_.PCI0.EHC2.HUBN.PR01.PR13
end-port
This example has two ports present. Each port has a label which is used to identify where the port is for a human. The ‘internal’ and ‘external’ keywords are used to indicate whether the port is internal to the system or external. In this case, the ‘internal’ port is found on the motherboard of the system. So it cannot be serviced or used without opening the system. The ‘chassis’ label indicates that this port is found on the chassis of the system itself. This is where most USB ports are that a user would find and use.
The port-type here indicates that they are USB 3 Type-A connectors, meaning that they support both USB 2.0 and USB 3.x. Finally, the various ‘acpi-path’ entries are used to indicate the ACPI path towards the port. Note how the ports are labeled based on the names of the ACPI device nodes. Each ‘.’ separates each node. The starting ‘\’ character is just part of the constructed path, it is not an escape character.
Writing Your Own Map
The way I’ve done this for other platforms is finding a USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 port and plugging it into each port subsequently. At each point, I look at the information in FMA and in the devices tree with prtconf
. By looking at the port numbers and what exists in the devices tree, one can, with a bit of manual work, piece together what’s required.
One challenge with doing this is when you’re on a system that has both the ehci and xhci controllers. Generally this is on Intel platforms from Sandy Bridge through Broadwell. In that case, you need to go into the BIOS and do this with xhci enabled and disabled in the BIOS. This will make sure that you can get all the ports connected to the ehci controller.
Further Reading
If you’re interested in the illumos implementation:
- The FMA USB topology module and the metadata parser
- The Kernel ACPI USB driver and glue
- USB Topology maps for three different platforms
For more on the specifications mentioned:
- The xHCI specification, currently revision 1.2.
- The SMBIOS specification, currently revision 3.2.
- The ACPI specification, revision 6.3.
Looking Ahead
While we’ve done some work, there’s more that we can do to improve the situation here in the future. This discusses some of those future directions.
Container ID Capability
The Container ID capability is the first tool at our disposal. The container ID is a 128-bit UUID — a universally unique identifier. All USB 3.x hubs are required to implement this capability and it can be read from the USB binary object store.
The idea behind this capability is that a device will have the same container ID value regardless of the type of bus that they’re on. So even though a USB 3.x hub will appear as two distinct hubs to the operating system, if they’re the same device, they’ll have the same container ID UUID. This gives the operating system a way to map such devices together.
When the USB Container ID capability is found in the binary object store, we add a property to the device node that indicates the UUID. This translates into a 16-byte byte array on the node whose value is the UUID. With this in mind, the USB topology plugin could go ahead and find hubs with matching container IDs.
More Consumers of USB Topology
While we’ve enhanced FMA and some of the tools like diskinfo(1M), we can do more here. For example, tools like cfgadm(1M) could be enhanced to query topology information when available listing devices in verbose
mode.
If we have a mapping that we feel confident in, it could even make sense to add another alias under /dev
to the device. Though these labels aren’t necessarily stable right now (as they’re meant for humans), so we’ll have to see what makes sense there.
Easier Tools to Build Topology Maps
Right now, it can take a bit of effort to build a topology map. It would be great if we had easy tooling for developing USB topology maps for different platforms that would walk someone through putting this together. It would also be useful if we had a way for a user to generate a topology for their system. That way, even if it’s something custom that’s been put together, it still isn’t too hard to put together a topology for their system.
What’s Next?
There’s a lot more to talk about with USB, topology, and hardware in general. If you’re interested in working on any of these aspects, reach out. I’m sure there’ll be more to do here as we have to deal with USB 3.2, Thunderbolt, and USB 4.0.
If you’d like to get involved, get in touch with the illumos community on IRC in #illumos on Freenode or a mailing list and I or someone else will help you out and see what we can do. As long as you’re willing to learn, receive feedback, and keep going despite difficulties, then it doesn’t matter what your experience is.