Setup composite USB-gadget in a breeze !

xg_multi stands for Extended g_multi (Multifunction Composite USB-gadget).
xg_multi seemlessly interoperates with Linux, macOS and Windows hosts (unlike g_multi¹).

This Extended Multifunction Composite USB-gadget is built upon libcomposite configfs system.
It is a shell script to run on device in order to enable features, rather than a driver to load (like for its sibling).

Features:

xg_multi does create the following gadgets on any device originaly in OTG-peripheral mode:

• serial (ACM)
• ethernet (ECM for Linux/macOS, RNDIS for Windows - switches gracefully)
• mass-storage

Benefits:

• Interoperates with most host OS computers (Linux/macOS/Windows) without additional host-side drivers or configuration required.
• Supports any linux device with OTG-peripheral capability (including Raspberry Pis).
• Performs initial OTG ports sanity-checks and returns diagnostics if not properly set.

Setup procedure:

Make sure dwc2 (or dwc3) driver is previously loaded on capable device, and configuration is set to OTG peripheral mode: this may be driven by hardware (including cable) and/or software.
(on supporting Pi devices, just add dtoverlay=dwc2,dr_mode=peripheral in config.txt to force both by software)

Then connect device to host via USB cable, and run xg_multi on device as follows:

usage: xg_multi [-D <MAC address>>] [-H <MAC address>] [-V <file path>]
       xg_multi -r

Setup (or remove) Extended Multifunction USB-gadget: serial, ethernet (ECM/RNDIS),
and mass-storage (if valid path is specified).
Ports are just created and are left unconfigured (i.e console, networking,...)

Options: -D|--Device <MAC address>  Specify MAC address for device
         -H|--Host <MAC address>    Specify MAC address for host
         -V|--Volume <file path>    Path to device/LUN file to use as mass-storage
         -r|--remove                Remove gadgets
         -h|--help                  Help information and usage

Main execution steps are logged: cat /var/log/messages | grep xg_multi.

OpenRC files are available to run xg_multi as a boot service; a complete Alpine Linux package is also available (check wiki for details).

Note:

• application-specific ports setup (i.e. serial options, console bring-up, networking configuration, ...) are not in the scope of this project: user shall take care of this after gadget ports are created.
  (i.e: on Alpine Linux, after running xg_multi, networking port setup can be done with setup-interfaces)
• for serial connection from Linux host featuring Modem Manager, host user may need to be part of dialout group, and create some filtering rule to avoid spurious AT commands on serial line.

  cat /etc/udev/rules.d/99-ttyacms-gadget.rules
  ATTRS{idVendor}=="0x1d6b" ATTRS{idProduct}=="0x0104", ENV{ID_MM_DEVICE_IGNORE}="1"

• xg_multi is intended to run on ash shell within busybox. It may work within other environments (bash,...), but has not been tested (yet).

Credits

Kudos for info & snippets from @geekman, @Leo-PL and many others to understand/work-around various MS-Windows particularites...

Footnotes

1. Windows does NOT support dual configurations (ECM/RNDIS) with composite gadget. ↩