Sarah Sharp (Linux Goddess) has created a custom Linux Kernel that will support the USB 3.0 standard before any other released OS’s. You can download the custom Linux Kernel from her site and she even is kind enough to give us unworthy indviduals step-by-step instructions on how to activate the USB 3.0 on your linux kernel. This is just in time. NEC is expected to have the first controllers out this month. Although we shouldn’t expect to see any USB 3.0 in consumer products until 2010, with commercial applications available in the first quarter of that year.

Here are some specs on USB 3.0 from Wikipedia:

• A new major feature is the SuperSpeed bus, which provides a fourth transfer mode at 5 Gbit/s. The raw throughput is 500 MByte/s, and the specification considers it reasonable to achieve 400 MByte/s or more after protocol overhead.^[34]
• When operating in SuperSpeed mode, full-duplex signaling occurs over 2 differential pairs separate from the non-SuperSpeed differential pair. This results in USB 3.0 cables containing 2 wires for power and ground, 2 wires for non-SuperSpeed data, and 4 wires for SuperSpeed data, and a shield (not required in previous specifications).^[35]
• To accommodate the additional pins for SuperSpeed mode, the physical form factors for USB 3.0 plugs and receptacles have been modified from those used in previous versions. Standard-A cables have extended heads where the SuperSpeed connectors extend beyond and slightly above the legacy connectors. Similarly, the Standard-A receptacle is deeper to accept these new connectors. A legacy Standard-A cable will operate as intended and will never interact with the SuperSpeed connectors, ensuring backward compatibility. The Standard-B modifications could not be made as elegantly; the SuperSpeed connectors had to be placed on top of the existing form factor, making legacy Standard-B plugs workable on SuperSpeed Standard-B receptacles, but not vice versa.
• SuperSpeed establishes a communications pipe between the host and each device, in a host-directed protocol. In contrast, USB 2.0 broadcasts packet traffic to all devices.
• USB 3.0 extends the bulk transfer type in SuperSpeed with Streams. This extension allows a host and device to create and transfer multiple streams of data through a single bulk pipe.
• New power management features include support of idle, sleep and suspend states, as well as Link-, Device-, and Function-level power management.
• The bus power spec has been increased so that a unit load is 150mA (+50% over USB 2.0). An unconfigured device can still draw only 1 unit load, but a configured device can draw up to 6 unit loads (900mA, an 80% increase over USB 2.0). Minimum device operating voltage is dropped from 4.4V to 4V.
• USB 3.0 does not define cable assembly lengths, except that it can be of any length as long as it meets all the requirements defined in the specification. However, electronicdesign.com estimates cables will be limited to 3 m at SuperSpeed.^[17]
• Technology is similar to a single channel (1x) of PCI Express 2.0 (5-Gbit/s). It uses 8B10B encoding, linear feedback shift register (LFSR) scrambling for data, spread spectrum. It forces receivers to use low frequency periodic signaling (LFPS), dynamic equalization, and training sequences to ensure fast signal locking.

Here is the link to Sarah’s site where you can get all of her goodness you need. The Geekess

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