libusb

About

This is the home of libusb, a library for user level applications to access USB devices uniformly across many different operating systems. libusb is an open source project licensed under the ​GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1.

Many participants in the libusb community have helped and continue to help with ideas, implementation, support and improvements for libusb.

Stable API: libusb-1.0

Daniel Drake adopted the project in January 2008 and worked on a libusb-1.0? release, which adds several features that were missing from the 0.1 API. As of December 2008, libusb-1.0 is the stable and recommended version to use. Developers are encouraged to port their applications to the new API.

• See the Libusb1.0? page for more information.
• ​Download libusb-1.0 releases here
• ​API documentation
• Compatibility with libusb-0.1 is available through the libusb-compat-0.1 compatibility layer?.
• The Windows backend uses WinUSB.sys or Win32 HID APIs, it is considered functional as of June 2010 and is being integrated into the main libusb-1.0 tree.

Legacy API: libusb-0.1

Johannes Erdfelt founded the libusb project and lead development through 2007. By then, libusb-0.1 had been developed, stabilized, and adopted by a wide range of projects.

• Last release: ​libusb-0.1.12
• Supported operating systems: Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin, MacOS X (and Windows, through the libusb-win32 project).
• Development status: libusb-0.1 has reached maturity and no further changes or releases are expected.
• Note that libusb-win32 is a separate project which still sees active development (mainly on the driver side, the API is stable and unlikely to be changed. Once libusb-1.0 supports the libusb0.sys device driver (#49) then the focus of the project will shift to support libusb-1.0 API along with the improvement of the driver. In that case, libusb-win32 users will be encouraged to shift to libusb-1.0 API.
• ​Download libusb-0.1 releases here
• ​API documentation
• ​Unofficial bindings, at the libusb-win32 site
• ​Projects and Examples using libusb-0.1 and libusb-win32

Support

Please ask support questions on the mailing list or in the IRC channel.

Bugs and feature requests

If you find a bug in libusb, or wish to request an enhancement, please open a ticket on this web page.

Make sure to view the list of active tickets before creating a new ticket, so that duplicates can be avoided.

Thank you for helping make libusb even better!

Related

• ​usbutils includes the very useful lsusb program to view descriptors in devices