libusb 1.0 messes up OS X Mavericks (10.9) USB drivers

Question

A simple run of ./listdevs from the libusb examples directory (without any devices connected) results in kernel messages like:

kernel[0]: [0xffffff8023f73c00](1)/(5) Device not responding
kernel[0]: com_apple_driver_AppleUSBCardReaderUMC:: Stop::Controller Reset
kernel[0]: considerRebuildOfPrelinkedKernel org.virtualbox.kext.VBoxDrv triggered rebuild
kernel[0]: USBMSC Identifier (non-unique): 000000009833 0x5ac 0x8403 0x9833, 2

More than one run may result in:

kernel[0]: AppleUSBMultitouchDriver::message - kIOUSBMessagePortHasBeenReset.
kernel[0]: AppleUSBMultitouchDriver: Touch failed to initialize after 765 ms

And at that point the internal keyboard and trackpad of my MacBook Pro are frozen. I can still use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. This was hard to track down since I first noticed it using a very simple test script which used pylibftdi (which uses libftdi, which uses libusb).

How can I fix this problem? Does this happen on older versions of OS X?

Answer 1

It turns out that libusbx does NOT exhibit this problem. In fact, it works perfectly.