Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S261794AbVDOKKL (ORCPT ); Fri, 15 Apr 2005 06:10:11 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S261795AbVDOKKK (ORCPT ); Fri, 15 Apr 2005 06:10:10 -0400 Received: from mail.zmailer.org ([62.78.96.67]:29351 "EHLO mail.zmailer.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S261794AbVDOKKA (ORCPT ); Fri, 15 Apr 2005 06:10:00 -0400 Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2005 13:09:59 +0300 From: Matti Aarnio To: Alejandro Bonilla Cc: Jeff Lessem , Matti Aarnio , Jesper Juhl , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: IBM Thinkpad T42 - Looking for a Developer. Message-ID: <20050415100959.GP3858@mea-ext.zmailer.org> References: <003901c54136$6ba545c0$9f0cc60a@amer.sykes.com> <20050414223641.M49815@linuxwireless.org> <20050414231513.GN3858@mea-ext.zmailer.org> <200504142354.j3ENsYj3028900@ibg.colorado.edu> <425F32E8.8090407@linuxwireless.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <425F32E8.8090407@linuxwireless.org> Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2547 Lines: 68 Good morning, On Thu, Apr 14, 2005 at 10:20:08PM -0500, Alejandro Bonilla wrote: > Matti, > > Where do we stand here? Now that you have two of those outputs, so I > can have some hope... Do you think we can make the driver for this > hardware? > > How about the firmware that the documents mention? Could there be a > layer in the hardware itself that might prevents us from reading the > fingerprint image? The hardware exists for fingerprint reading. It is all a matter of understanding of how to talk to those BULK endpoints to do proper communication, and that is somewhat challening without that level of documentation. In USB documents that kind of document is known as "Device Class Definition" idVendor 0x0483 SGS Thomson Microelectronics idProduct 0x2016 iManufacturer 1 STMicroelectronics iProduct 2 Biometric Coprocessor Interface Descriptor: bNumEndpoints 3 bInterfaceClass 255 Vendor Specific Class bInterfaceSubClass 0 bInterfaceProtocol 0 iInterface 0 This "Vendor Specific Class" means it needs specific document, not only USB Implementers' Forum:s generic documents. Windows driver binary does implement it, and (at least in EU) it is perfectly legal to reverse engineer something in order to produce compatible products or to use something that isn't completely documented. Nevertheless I would prefer to have documents about actual communication messages that are exchanged over those endpoints. That would speed up driver writing considerably. > Will BioAPI help us at all, or the best approach here is not to make > dll wrapping? At least I prefer not to mess with (windows-)DLL-wrapping. Linux exists in quite a many platforms, and the BioAPI library does already exist for Linux in source form as well. That reference BioAPI implementation needs very least the backend driver of the actual reader. What else does it need, I can't say without doing experimentation and code reading. If the necessary document is deep NDA for some reason, we can negotiate with the vendor about how obfuscated version of the resulting driver source can be included in open source distributions. > Thanks for you all time, > - Alejandro /Matti Aarnio - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/