What's the best way to determine if a HID device driver can be written in user space on OSX?

Question

I need to write a number of drivers for both HID USB devices as well as some old serial devices. The drivers are to pull data off the device and then send the data over to an application that then consumes it. Since the Apple Docs mention that a lot of USB and HID communication can be done from the user space I had assumed that I would not need to write a kernel extension, at least not for the HID devices. Could some one tell me a more solid way to determine this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you're writing a single application that must talk to one or more USB HID devices you may well find you can just access the devices straight from the application using the application-level USB APIs.

A kernel driver would be more for something like a networking or mass storage device that needed to integrate with the kernel to be be available to multiple applications.

This Apple document Common QA and Roadmap for USB Software Development on Mac OS X goes into some detail on the matter and links to example code too.