libusb-1.0.9-rc3

Ludovic Rousseau

2011-12-03 09:15

The libusb 1.0.9 adventure is still ongoing. In a previous article "libusb 1.0.9-rc1" I announced that the 1.0.9 official/stable version was expected for 21st of September 2011. Of course this did not happen :-(

With the upgrade of the Linux kernel in lots of distributions it looks like the 60 seconds delay issue is more present and/or occurs more often. So I get more bug reports. The problem is not pcsc-lite or the CCID driver. The bug is in libusb.

History of the bug #56

The bug has been identified and a fix was proposed in April 2010.
libusb-1.0.8 has been released in 4th May 2010 without the bug fixed.
A fix has been committed in libusb git repository in September 10th, 2011.
libusb 1.0.9-rc3 with the fix has not moved since September 22th, 2011.
The patch is not yet available in the master branch, only in the testing branch.

This is the 4th article about this libsub bug. We already had:

"new" version of libusb, March 30, 2011
"new" version of libusb, part 2, May 5, 2011
libusb 1.0.9-rc1, September 18, 2011
and now libusb-1.0.9-rc3, December 3, 2011

How to get a fixed libusb?

$ git clone git://git.libusb.org/libusb.git
$ cd libusb
$ git branch testing origin/testing
$ git checkout testing

If you want to use an already prepared .tar.bz2 archive I provide one at http://ludovic.rousseau.free.fr/softwares/pcsc-lite/libusb-1.0.9-rc3.tar.bz2.

Conclusion

A lot of time and energy is lost by users of smart cards reporting bugs, and by me answering to bugs.

The bad news is that I don't see any positive signal for the future of libusb. I will continue to refer to the this article for any bug report mentioning a 60 seconds delay.