Some months ago, I picked up a an Aeon Labs Z-Stick Series 2. The Z-Stick is USB-equipped Z-Wave controller, using CP210x chipset to provide access to the Z-Wave module's UART over USB. The official driver from Silicon Labs simply didn't work at all, timing out on any read or write to the device. So I decided to take a crack at writing my own driver.
The driver works great for my purposes -- I can turn my lights on and off without ever leaving my desk. Awesome, right?
The bad news? That's where I'm going to stop, at least for now. Between poor documentation, ambiguously defined behavior, and more layers of indirection than I can reasonably decipher in a spare afternoon, I've had my fill of IOKit for a while. Of the 1.2k lines of code in the driver so far, maybe 40 LoC actually has anything to do with talking to the CP210x; the rest is all IOKit-required boilerplate.
In my experience, third-party USB serial drivers for Mac OS X tend to be extremely buggy. Most of the drivers I've tested panic during use, don't work at all, or fail under relatively standard usage such as unplugging the device while running. I previously assumed that the entire blame for this rested on the driver's authors. Then I tried to write a USB serial driver for Mac OS X, and gained a whole new appreciation for anyone embarking on this journey.
If I were to revisit this in the future, I'd like to spend some time abstracting out the driver into a generic re-usable USB serial layer that I could use to implement additional drivers. Most USB serial devices have nearly identical interfaces -- a bulk input pipe, a bulk output pipe, and actual control requests that vary between devices, but tend to provide similar functionality -- a good fit for centralizing all the complex IOKit state management and boilerplate in one place. This is what Haiku does, to pretty good effect: compare the roughly 138 lines of Haiku's implementation with my IOKit monster
If you'd like to use the driver -- or help with the remaining issues -- you can find the source available at the mac-cp210x project page. The additional work will be solving lifecycle issues around asynchronous device control messages and unplug/driver unload behavior, enabling the existing code to allow manual control over RTS/DTR lines, and implementing state updates on changes to the incoming control lines.
Otherwise, I'll probably revisit the code whenever spending a few weekends with IOKit sounds like fun again.