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macos: lacking automatic detection of serial port device path #13

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quite opened this issue Apr 14, 2023 · 4 comments
Open

macos: lacking automatic detection of serial port device path #13

quite opened this issue Apr 14, 2023 · 4 comments
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enhancement New feature or request

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@quite
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quite commented Apr 14, 2023

In 0.0.2 we decided to remove the automatic detection of TKey serial port device path on Macos. The implementation (https://github.com/bugst/go-serial/blob/master/enumerator/usb_darwin.go) was not in pure Go and required the use of Golang's Cgo -- that is, calls to C code. To compile it, Macos/Darwin libraries/headers/source code needs to be available (and C compiler is used). Because of this, it became complicated to reproducibly build release binaries (and also to build them all on one platform). We decided to prioritize reproducible builds of these binaries, which are used by customers to verify that their TKey is genuine.

The consequence of removing automatic TKey detection on Macos is that after plugging in the TKey, user has to first list the available serial ports using something like ls -l /dev/cu*, and then run the verification using the relevant serial port like: tkey-verification verify --port /dev/cu.usbmodemN). There will typically only be 1 /dev/cu.usbmodem present, unless the user has some other similar serial-port based devices plugged in. Other platforms does not (usually) require the use of the --port option.

One idea to work around this was to just have the program look for any /dev/cu.usbmodem* devices and if exactly 1 is found, then use it. This runs into the risk of talking to a serial port which does not belong to a TKey. However unlikely, this does not seem like a nice thing to do. The point of using the enumeration of the go-serial library is that it can list serial ports that belong to a USB device with a specific, known VendorID:ProductID (1207:8887 being Tillitis').

The path forward to enable auto-detection on Macos is probably to think through and implement a way to conveniently build reproducible Macos releases (of both architectures) when using CGO (ideally getting the two other platforms built at the same time). Or, could there be a pure-Go way to find out about the origins of a device-node on Macos?

@quite
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quite commented Apr 18, 2023

It is probably possible to call /usr/bin/ioreg with the right options and parse the output, probably having to dig a second time as well. Not very nice and maybe not reliable. And that's parsing some kind of tree hierarchy realized in ASCII (or if using -a, parsing xml...).

@udf2457
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udf2457 commented Aug 19, 2023

FYI system_profiler can provide JSON output which might be more attractive than parsing XML 😉

So something along the lines of system_profiler -json SPUSBDataType

@dehanj dehanj added the enhancement New feature or request label Sep 11, 2023
@dehanj
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dehanj commented Sep 11, 2023

@udf2457 Great suggestion, we will look into it!

@dehanj
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dehanj commented May 21, 2024

Been looking into this a bit now;

There seems to exists a few different options, (1) ioreg or (2) system_profiler.

(1) ioreg -r -c IOUSBHostDevice -l -x
One can look for the key IODialinDevice which provides the path to the serial device, for example /dev/tty.usbmodem1101. It is also possible to find the USB PID and VID. However, once you add the -aflag to get the output in XML, the VID and PID seems to be removed?! Not sure why. The XML output is huge, and needs to be parsed well, and it is not completely trivial how to know it is the path to the right serial device.

(2) system_profiler SPUSBDataType -json
This gives nice output in json, however does not seem to provide the path to the serial port. So, this is not so useful on its own. It is however very useful to confirm that a device of a certain PID and VID is connected to the computer.

So a solution could be to combination of the two above, even if it will be a lot of parsing and XML/JSON structs.

Maybe a good enough solution is to use (2), see that the correct device is connected to the computer. If there is only one, try to connect to it. If there are two or more devices, print them out for the user to select using --port.

There might be other options as well...

dehanj added a commit that referenced this issue May 21, 2024
- Tkeyclient does not support building static binaries for Darwin, it
  requires CGO to enable enumeration of connected serial devices. In the
  short term we enable CGO for Darwin before we can find another
  reliable solution. See issue #13.
mchack-work pushed a commit that referenced this issue May 22, 2024
- Tkeyclient does not support building static binaries for Darwin, it
  requires CGO to enable enumeration of connected serial devices. In the
  short term we enable CGO for Darwin before we can find another
  reliable solution. See issue #13.
mchack-work pushed a commit that referenced this issue May 22, 2024
- Tkeyclient does not support building static binaries for Darwin, it
  requires CGO to enable enumeration of connected serial devices. In the
  short term we enable CGO for Darwin before we can find another
  reliable solution. See issue #13.
dehanj added a commit that referenced this issue May 23, 2024
- Tkeyclient does not support building static binaries for Darwin, it
  requires CGO to enable enumeration of connected serial devices. In the
  short term we enable CGO for Darwin before we can find another
  reliable solution. See issue #13.
dehanj added a commit that referenced this issue May 23, 2024
- Tkeyclient does not support building static binaries for Darwin, it
  requires CGO to enable enumeration of connected serial devices. In the
  short term we enable CGO for Darwin before we can find another
  reliable solution. See issue #13.
dehanj added a commit that referenced this issue May 23, 2024
- Tkeyclient does not support building static binaries for Darwin, it
  requires CGO to enable enumeration of connected serial devices. In the
  short term we enable CGO for Darwin before we can find another
  reliable solution. See issue #13.
dehanj added a commit that referenced this issue May 23, 2024
- Tkeyclient does not support building static binaries for Darwin, it
  requires CGO to enable enumeration of connected serial devices. In the
  short term we enable CGO for Darwin before we can find another
  reliable solution. See issue #13.
mchack-work pushed a commit that referenced this issue Jun 11, 2024
- Tkeyclient does not support building static binaries for Darwin, it
  requires CGO to enable enumeration of connected serial devices. In the
  short term we enable CGO for Darwin before we can find another
  reliable solution. See issue #13.
mchack-work pushed a commit that referenced this issue Jun 17, 2024
- Tkeyclient does not support building static binaries for Darwin, it
  requires CGO to enable enumeration of connected serial devices. In the
  short term we enable CGO for Darwin before we can find another
  reliable solution. See issue #13.
mchack-work pushed a commit that referenced this issue Jun 24, 2024
- Tkeyclient does not support building static binaries for Darwin, it
  requires CGO to enable enumeration of connected serial devices. In the
  short term we enable CGO for Darwin before we can find another
  reliable solution. See issue #13.
mchack-work pushed a commit that referenced this issue Jun 25, 2024
- Tkeyclient does not support building static binaries for Darwin, it
  requires CGO to enable enumeration of connected serial devices. In the
  short term we enable CGO for Darwin before we can find another
  reliable solution. See issue #13.
mchack-work pushed a commit that referenced this issue Jun 25, 2024
- Tkeyclient does not support building static binaries for Darwin, it
  requires CGO to enable enumeration of connected serial devices. In the
  short term we enable CGO for Darwin before we can find another
  reliable solution. See issue #13.
mchack-work pushed a commit that referenced this issue Jun 25, 2024
- Tkeyclient does not support building static binaries for Darwin, it
  requires CGO to enable enumeration of connected serial devices. In the
  short term we enable CGO for Darwin before we can find another
  reliable solution. See issue #13.
dehanj added a commit that referenced this issue Jun 27, 2024
- Tkeyclient does not support building static binaries for Darwin, it
  requires CGO to enable enumeration of connected serial devices. In the
  short term we enable CGO for Darwin before we can find another
  reliable solution. See issue #13.
dehanj added a commit that referenced this issue Jun 27, 2024
- Tkeyclient does not support building static binaries for Darwin, it
  requires CGO to enable enumeration of connected serial devices. In the
  short term we enable CGO for Darwin before we can find another
  reliable solution. See issue #13.
dehanj added a commit that referenced this issue Jul 2, 2024
- Tkeyclient does not support building static binaries for Darwin, it
  requires CGO to enable enumeration of connected serial devices. In the
  short term we enable CGO for Darwin before we can find another
  reliable solution. See issue #13.
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