Hacker News: WerWolv

New comment by WerWolv in "USB for Software Developers: An introduction to writing userspace USB drivers"

WerWolv — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:20:46 +0000

WebUSB works in pretty much the same way. You'll have the same set of functions that libusb exposes there too.

Sadly it's not supported at all on anything but Chrome right now

New comment by WerWolv in "USB for Software Developers: An introduction to writing userspace USB drivers"

WerWolv — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 08:12:27 +0000

Descriptors also were kind of a mystery for me until I realized that they're just a binary structure with a fixed format that the host reads and interprets.

The device descriptor is easy enough to get right as it doesn't have too many fields and every USB class just defines in the specification which Class and SubClass it uses for its interface descriptor as well as which endpoints that interface needs to have. And that's, for the most part, all you need for the host to recognize your device

New comment by WerWolv in "USB for Software Developers: An introduction to writing userspace USB drivers"

WerWolv — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 05:53:47 +0000

ADB uses libusb or WinUSB directly from userspace too yeah. On Windows you still need a .inf driver though because the WinUSB driver isn't getting loaded by default for Android devices because they're lacking the MS OS Descriptor

New comment by WerWolv in "USB for Software Developers: An introduction to writing userspace USB drivers"

WerWolv — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:50:21 +0000

dfu-util actually also just uses libusb under the hood! Any class or device that doesn't have a driver baked into the OS can be implemented like this. And if you'd need the DFU functionality in a different application, you may be able to just simply link parts of the dfu-util tool into your application

New comment by WerWolv in "USB for Software Developers: An introduction to writing userspace USB drivers"

WerWolv — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:46:35 +0000

Arguably all these other subsystems shouldn't be in the Kernel either but that's a different topic :)

There are quite a few benefits to doing these things in userspace over the Kernel, not really necessarily just because of the code size:

- The code is much easier to write and debug, you just write code like you always would.

- Bugs don't have the possibility to taking down your entire system or introduce vulnerabilities

- Especially on Windows, everyone can do this without requiring an impossible to get driver signing certificate

New comment by WerWolv in "USB for Software Developers: An introduction to writing userspace USB drivers"

WerWolv — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 20:13:32 +0000

On Linux you could create a tun/tap device from your application and translate data sent over that to requests sent to the ethernet adapter.

Of course, when you're doing these things in userspace you either need some way of communicating with the Kernel or for the other subsystems to be in userspace as well.

USB for Software Developers: An introduction to writing userspace USB drivers

WerWolv — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 19:23:34 +0000

Article URL: https://werwolv.net/posts/usb_for_sw_devs/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47695012

Points: 411

# Comments: 48

New comment by WerWolv in "Imhex: A hex editor for reverse engineers"

WerWolv — Sat, 29 Jun 2024 18:54:38 +0000

Hey, I'd just like to tune in here real quick. I've been using this username since I was like 10, long before I really understood what Nazis are. By the time I learned about this, I've already had this username for years and changing it everywhere would have been a ton of work. As a native German speaker, this association is really not something people generally make. I'd mostly just like to state that I'm probably as far away from being a right extremist as I can be.

New comment by WerWolv in "ImHex – A Hex Editor"

WerWolv — Sat, 30 Jul 2022 18:29:53 +0000

By default it uses a pixel-perfect font (the one that's included in ImGui) so anti-aliasing will not do anything but make text look blurry.

If you don't like the default font, it's super easy to change it though. Just go into the settings and under Font select your .ttf Font file

New comment by WerWolv in "ImHex – A Hex Editor"

WerWolv — Sat, 30 Jul 2022 18:22:43 +0000

Thanks a lot for the love! If you have any feature requests, face any problems or have any questions, please open an issue on my GitHub page and I'll make sure to look into it as soon as possible. There's also a Discord server linked at the top of the Readme