Henning's Linux Kernel Page

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Linux USB Scanner Driver

OBSOLETE

This driver is not included in Linux 2.6.3 and later anymore. Please use libusb instead. SANE supports libusb since version 1.0.9.

Introduction

The Linux USB scanner driver is able to detect most USB scanners. It supports detection, reading from bulk-in endpoints, writing to bulk-out endpoints, sending control messages and asking for vendor and product ids. All the high level support must be done by applications like SANE. That means that it isn't sufficiant that a scanner is detected by the kernel scanner driver. Without a SANE (or other userspace) program that supports the scanner, acquiring images is impossible.

The scanner driver was originally written and maintained by David E. Nelson and later maintained by Brian Beattie. In 2003, I took over maintainership.

Some scanners aren't supported by the generic scanner driver but by special drivers:

Hewlett-Packard 53xx series, Hewlett-Packard 7400, Minolta Scan Dual II, Minolta Elite II: Use the hpusbscsi driver instead
Microtek Scanmaker X6: Use the microtek USB driver instead

If your scanner is not one of the above mentioned devices but isn't detected by the scanner driver, try to load the scanner module with the vendor and device options, see documenation section for details. Please send me the vendor and product ids of scanners that are not detected yet.

Documentation

Look at the explanation in /usr/src/linux/documentation/usb/scanner.txt.

Contact

General USB or kernel scanner driver questions, help and support: write to the linux-usb-users mailinglist (see Links section). Have a look at the archives, maybe your problem has been solved already.
General USB development: write to the linux-usb-devel mailinglist.
Bug reports (oops, misdetection etc.) specific to the USB scanner driver, new vendor/product ids, errors on this webpage: contact me (henning@meier-geinitz.de). Please describe exactly, what you are talking about :-).

Bugs and missing features

If you miss something in the scanner driver, please contact me. This list only mentions issues that are not already fixed in the latest stable kernel (pre-) release.

If you get timeouts during detection of your scanner, try to use a kernel without APIC support. That's not a problem specific to the scanner driver.
Devices that need an interrupt endpoint: They are detected, but the interrupt endpoint isn't used yet. Use libusb instead.
Devices that need direct access to any USB descriptor: not supported, use libusb instead.
Check the behaviour of read_scanner() for short packages. Decreasing count by this_read instead of partial looks wrong on first sight. I won't change that for now because according to the original maintainers that's intended behaviour.
Use actconfig everywhere?