Missing USB serial drivers for DSM 7

Supported drivers

• cp210x
• ch341
• pl2303 (not for all platforms)
• ti_usb_3410_5052 (not for all platforms)

Supported platforms

• apollolake (linux-4.4.x)
• armada38x (linux-3.10.x-bsp)
• armadaxp (linux-3.x)
• avoton (linux-3.10.x)
• braswell (linux-3.10.x)
• cedarview (linux-3.10.x)
• geminilake (linux-4.4.x)
• monaco (linux-3.10.x)
• v1000 (linux-4.4.x)

Feel free to request other drivers or platforms. You can find out which platform your NAS is using on this page. Also check here to see if you can find the desired drivers for your platform there.

Installation

NB: the following steps will require SSH access and administrator rights. For the latter, either use sudo for each command or use su to log in as root.

• The kernel modules for each supported platform can be found in modules/. Copy the required files to your Synology and move them to /lib/modules
• To get DSM 7 to load the modules at boot time, copy the included file usb-serial-drivers.sh to /usr/local/etc/rc.d
• Make sure that the file has executable permissions: chmod +x /usr/local/etc/rc.d/usb-serial-drivers.sh

You don't need to reboot your NAS for the modules to load, just execute the script after you completed the previous steps:

# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/usb-serial-drivers.sh start

Building from source

I've built these modules in an Ubuntu 18.04.5 virtual machine on my Synology NAS.

To set up the build environment, I followed the steps in this document. The different NAS targets/platforms can be installed next to each other.

To build the modules for a particular platform, I follow these steps:

sudo rm -fr /toolkit/build_env/ds.$platform-7.0/source
sudo /toolkit/pkgscripts-ng/PkgCreate.py -X 1 -P 1 -v 7.0 --min-sdk 7.0 -p $platform $module
cp -v /toolkit/build_env/ds.$platform-7.0/source/$module/*.ko /tmp

Replace $platform with the NAS platform, for example apollolake. Replace $module with the source directory name (found in sources/ in this repository) relevant for that particular platform. For example, apollolake requires the 4.4.x sources.

Put together, to build for apollolake, the commands become:

sudo rm -fr /toolkit/build_env/ds.apollolake-7.0/source
sudo /toolkit/pkgscripts-ng/PkgCreate.py -X 1 -P 1 -v 7.0 --min-sdk 7.0 -p apollolake 4.4.x
cp -v /toolkit/build_env/ds.apollolake-7.0/source/$module/*.ko /tmp

Due to some concurrency issues that I haven't bothered to look into, the second step (PkgCreate) sometimes fails with a compilation error. If that happens, start over.

The last step will copy the driver modules to /tmp

Disclaimer

I don't/can't test every driver. Use at your own peril.

Attribution

I'm using the source code (as-is) for the drivers included in the Linux kernel from the Synology Open Source Project and the Synology Toolchain GPL sources.