http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/11/linu ... r-usb-3-0/


Congrats Linux users

That's excellent news, I doubt very much if that will persuade any switchers, but it's great news nonetheless.

Nice to see. USB3 has pretty much passed me by, presumably an add-in USB controller card is needed as well as devices to connect to much like USB 2. Will be interesting to see how quickly USB3 ports start appearing on new motherboards..

The ports themselves are the same, I assume? And it's backwards compatible?

As for the driver situation, am I right in thinking that this is a driver for the USB3 controller, and that any devices which actually use it will need their own driver?

I would say yes...Though mass storage devices, popular scanners/printers/cameras would probably be included with the distro as usual...

But only after they have been created, surely?

My basic question is, does anything actually work with it yet???

I'm only guessing here, but I'd say yes...My reasoning being that USB 3 is backwards compatible with USB 2, so the driver for the controller would get loaded to drive the USB 3 controller, and then the device (eg camera) is found, so the camera driver gets loaded and is used, that USB 3 controller should be abstracted by this point, so the camera driver should work fine over the USB 3 controller and it's drivers.

Yeah, that makes sense.

The ports themselves are physically similar to allow for backwards compatibility, but when USB2 came out, USB1 ports didn't suddenly start running faster!

Sure. What about cables? I know you can use the same cables for 1 and 2. I assume this is the same for 3?

In theory it's work as USB only has a short transmission distance.
Although you might need better quality cables to get the full speed (without jitter & error correction slowing it down) a bit like long hdmi's

USB3 does not support USB1 legacy devices, but my understanding is the leads have physically matable connectors.

However, just as old USB1 leads can cause errors on USB2 devices you should always use a USB3 lead on USB3 devices for maximum performance.

It's like with network cables. Just because the plugs are the same, doesn't mean the leads are the same quality.

My fave thing about USB3 is the increased power available, rather than the speed. Between PoE and USB3 we should see a reduction in pesky mains adapters. I have over 9000 of the damned things, and that's a lot of 4 way extension leads

SATA3 is here now too. The interconnects are slowly catching up with the hardware