Apple's USB Serial DriverKit Driver Problems

All,


I'm posting this to share my experience and help others having the same issues. With the final GM of Catalina I've noticed the bundled Apple DriverKit drivers for USB Serial devices fail to work with many devices.


So far I've only tested the AppleUSBSLCOM drivers for Silicon Labs (SiLabs) CP2102 devices. This driver binds to several other chip types - the CP2102N, CP2104, CP2108, and CP2109, but the driver only SUPPORTS the CP2102. If you're using one of the devices listed the Apple driver fails to send or receive any data and hangs.


Installing the kernel driver provided by Silicon Labs addresses the issue but causes two different serial port device nodes to be created under /dev, one that works and one that doesn't.


I know Apple means well - and user space DriverKit drivers are a great idea - but their current implementation is severely broken and is causing a lot of headaches for users. To make matters worse, because of SIP, these drivers can't be easily removed like poorly behaving third party drivers can be. So the USB/Serial driver situation on macOS just went from terrible to apocalyptic.


Meh.

Replies

Hi,


any news regarding this?


I experienced the same problems with the onboard USBSerial drivers in Catalina. The Chip is beeing correctly identified but no device is created.


CP2104 USB to UART Bridge Controller:

Product ID: 0xea60

Vendor ID: 0x10c4 (Silicon Laboratories, Inc.)

Version: 1.00

Serial Number: 01E32666

Speed: Up to 12 Mb/s

Manufacturer: Silicon Labs

Location ID: 0x14400000 / 16

Current Available (mA): 500

Current Required (mA): 100

Extra Operating Current (mA): 0


Log says:


Device DB | Creating local devices
Device DB | Creating bonjour devices
Added | [USB][ CP2104 USB to UART ] ( 0, 0, 0) @ 0x14400000 |
Inferior | [USB][ CP2104 USB to UART ] (ff, 0, 0) @ 0x14400000 |


Are there any specific actions I can take to narrow down the root cause? Any additional debugging?


The

FT232R USB UART works perfect with the onboard drivers.


thanks

Horst