Serial port detection fails on WSL

[WyvernSpite]

I am using WSL following the setup guide here: https://github.com/32blit/32blit-sdk/blob/master/docs/Windows-WSL.md

While following the instructions and troubleshooting section of this page: https://github.com/32blit/32blit-sdk/blob/master/docs/32blit.md#flasher-cant-find-32blit-port

I was unable to determine how to find which port to provide to successfully push a blit to the device

Thanks to ali1234 on the discord I was finally able to manually set the port. They asked me to include the following:

python3 -m serial.tools.list_ports -v

all results return

desc: n/a
hwid: n/a

And finally:

192 ports found

[ali1234]

It seems like pyserial isn't able to get the vid and pid of the serial devices when run within WSL. This causes autodetection to fail. We can report this upstream but I suspect they will be unable to fix it unless Microsoft improves their serial port wrapper. So we should document this in the SDK docs. We could perhaps also make 32blit tool print a more helpful error if detection fails. Maybe try to detect if it is being run in WSL?

[Daft-Freak]

WSL1 just forwards COMx -> /dev/ttySx as a raw serial port, there's no USB forwarding so no USB ids. WSL2 is somehow worse than WSL1, it doesn't even forward the serial ports...

(It's apparently possible to forward USB devices in WSL2+Win11 though: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/connecting-usb-devices-to-wsl/)

[Gadgetoid]

You can install Python and the 32blit tools directly in Windows and run it from there IIRC.

This is one of the many reasons I ditched WSL for Linux.

IIRC there were ways to detect running in WSL via /proc/version or uname -a which could probably help direct users.