Comment 123 for bug 156085

Karri: I can see at least two ways of solving this in more recent Ubuntus. One is virtualisation (e.g. VirtualBox with USB virtualisation, since that no longer depends on /proc/bus/usb :) ). The other would be a preloaded libary which emulated /proc/bus/usb while actually accessing /dev/bus/usb and sysfs. Much like the way that OSS was emulated in user space over ALSA. The second solution should also work for USBView by the way.

Such a library is in my opinion a correct way of dealing with legacy devices which are lacking in current kernels (keeping the support in the kernel after its sell-by date is rather ugly, it seems to me) and it shouldn't be too much work to write as long as you don't have to support polling on files, although I hasten to add that I'm not volunteering for the job :)