lcsniff becomes unresponsive when capturing High Speed traffic

[desowin]

During the capture, the packet counter initially increments at a high pace, slowing down eventually and then getting stuck. Only after few houndred thousand packets the UI becomes completely unresponsive. A simple capture to file option could improve the situation - that is, just write the data to file, without updating the GUI.

[jeanthom]

As a temporary workaround, have you tried ticking the high level capture box (which ditches low level packets not useful for protocol reverse engineering)? This should help a bit.

The problem we're currently facing is partly related to the GUI. usb2sniffer-qt makes extensive use of Qt Data Model APIs, which is both a good thing as interfacing Qt widgets to Qt Models is really easy and a bad thing as those model don't scale very well. Will investigate this issue when I'll have some free time.

[desowin]

As a temporary workaround, have you tried ticking the high level capture box (which ditches low level packets not useful for protocol reverse engineering)? This should help a bit.

The difference is quite marginal, atleast in my use case. It still becomes completely unusable in few seconds.

[jeanthom]

I tried to make a simple cli application for you for recording usb capture sessions into .usb or .pcap files: https://github.com/jeanthom/usb2sniffer-cli

It is a bit dodgy for the moment, and lots of things are loaded in RAM throughout the capture which I don't particularly like, but nonetheless this should be much much less bloated than QT's memory model.

If you can get it to work, please tell me if that would solve the issues you're facing with high speed capture.

[raplin]

Hi,
The windows app is unusable, at least for me; it captures maybe 1-2k packets (even from a FS device) and then grinds to a halt and crashes. The hardware looks great, and appears to work, but the software just is just broken. (am in Win7, with latest FT600 drivers installed; I have a LimeSDR Mini which uses an FT600 and that works fine).
I was kinda expecting the sniffer software to do some packet decoding not dump hex contents.. or at least save .pcap files for use with wireshark.. I tried loading a saved capture from your tool into the app for the 1480 USB analyzer (which looks pretty good) and it just came up up as junk data.
I needed this tool for some upcoming work and it's just not suitable for sale as a USB sniffer. I know the software side of this sort of tool is work but... this isn't suitable to be sold as a commercial product imo. I wasn't expecting something as cool as a Beagle 480 but...
Sorry to complain but am disappointed; spent hundreds of dollars for a very pretty - but functionally useless - device on my desk. :-(

[key2]

sorry to hear. we’ll try to improve. Alternatively have u tested https://github.com/ultraembedded/usb2sniffer ?

…

On 8 Aug 2020, at 00:19, Richard Aplin ***@***.***> wrote:  Hi, The windows app is unusable, at least for me; it captures maybe 1-2k packets (even from a FS device) and then grinds to a halt and crashes. The hardware looks great, and appears to work, but the software just is just broken. (am in Win7, with latest FT600 drivers installed; I have a LimeSDR Mini which uses an FT600 and that works fine). I was kinda expecting the sniffer software to do some packet decoding not dump hex contents.. or at least save .pcap files for use with wireshark.. I tried loading a saved capture from your tool into the app for the 1480 USB analyzer (which looks pretty good) and it just came up up as junk data. I needed this tool for some upcoming work and it's just not suitable for sale as a USB sniffer. I know the software side of this sort of tool is work but... this isn't suitable to be sold as a commercial product imo. I wasn't expecting something as cool as a Beagle 480 but... Sorry to complain but am disappointed; spent hundreds of dollars for a very pretty - but functionally useless - device on my desk. :-( — You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe.

[jeanthom]

Hi Richard,

Are you using the 0.9 release or a fresh build from the git sources? The 0.9 release is outdated and shouldn't be used. We currently have Pcap export and some performance improvement that will, I hope, improve your experience. As @key2 said, our friend @ultraembedded did release an alternative gateware/software for USB2Sniffer but it is AFAIK Linux/macOS only.

If you are unable to build usb2sniffer-qt, I'll do it for you tomorrow.

[raplin]

oooooh interesting... looking at the other project. I don't run desktop linux, (I mean have dozens of linux VMs and SBCs and EC2 instances but I use Win as a desktop b/c of all the zillions of win-only embedded vendor tools)

Yes am using your 0.9 release; ..have a bunch of paid work going on right now and not really time for a 'fun side project' ;-) If you could put up a release of the new -qt version that I'm sure that would help; reliable capture and pcap export certainly would be welcome. Thanks for the quick replies

[raplin]

Just FYI : I built the -cli version for a Raspberry Pi 4 and it works ok; with your FT600 kernel driver (there is no official FT600 driver for ARM) the sniffer enumerates as SS, and it captures (tried FS or HS), and the pcap loads into wireshark. Obviously the CLI sniffer is kinda limited (captures to ram etc) but it's nice to see it work. The ultraembedded sniffer I couldn't build for RPi as it assumes an x86 driver. Congrats on having the only FT600 driver that works on a RPi ;-)

[jeanthom]

lcsniff-master.zip

Built this morning. I'm not a Windows packaging expert, so there might be a DLL missing (I hope not).

[nefarius]

@raplin made a Windows CLI build in my fork.