8.10 unable to use EHCI-mode USB on ATI SB700

[Bill Smith]

I have an existing ATI 740G motherboard with an SB700 chipset. I had no USB problems under 8.04.1, including the most recent kernel upgrades. About 3 weeks ago I did a fresh install (and on a new hard-drive) of 8.10. Now I have lots of USB problems! I tried swapping drives and booting back to 8.04.1 and the problems were gone so I'm assuming there's an incompatibility with the 8.10 kernel and the SB700 chipset?

The specific problem is that most all USB devices fail to connect initially, and after about 30 seconds they're recognized in OHCI mode (USB 1.1, right?). In particular I'm having trouble with flash drives and difference in read/write speed is obvious. My flash drives work reliably in OHCI mode. Sometimes I'm able to get a drive recognized in EHCI mode but then file transfers will fail a few seconds later.

Here's a sample of the 'dmesg' log:

[ 629.136534] usb 3-4: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 19
[ 639.568532] usb 3-4: device not accepting address 19, error -110
[ 639.972399] usb 1-2: new full speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 5
[ 640.147273] usb 1-2: not running at top speed; connect to a high speed hub
[ 640.211078] usb 1-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice

What other information do I need to provide to troubleshoot this?

Finally, the only other difference between the old and new installs is that the old 8.04.1 install does not have the ATI proprietary video driver whereas the 8.10 does.

[Bill Smith (bsmith1051)]

I did some more testing:

Ubuntu 8.04.1 LiveCD
- immediately mounts my flash drive (and with full-speed) but then errs-out

Ubuntu 9.04 "Alpha3"
- works perfectly

Sorry, I forgot to check the kernel version with each but surely that's easy to locate? Same with the ehci driver-version (which I'm not sure how to check anyways).

If this is fixed in 9.04 that'd be great but it sure would be nice to find the problem and backport to the earlier versions (8.04.2 and 8.10)

[Bill Smith (bsmith1051)]

I just tried the suggestion from here,
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.20/+bug/88746/comments/500
basically, to load the USB2 driver before the USB1 (I think...) and it worked! At least so far, copying files to/from my same 16GB flash-drive are now full-speed and error-free.

FYI
I only did the first step:
- Add to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules:
    ehci_hcd

I did not make any change to my kernel init.

[Jeremy Foshee (jeremyfoshee)]

Bill,
    Can you confirm this issue exists with the most recent Karmic Koala 9.10 Alpha release? ISO CD images are available at http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/karmic/ . If the issue remains with Karmic it would be great to then also test the latest upstream mainline kernel available. This will allow additional upstream developers to examine this issue. Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds.

Thanks in advance.

-JFo

[Jeremy Foshee (jeremyfoshee)]

This bug report was marked as Incomplete and has not had any updated comments for quite some time. As a result this bug is being closed. Please reopen if this is still an issue in the current Ubuntu release http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download . Also, please be sure to provide any requested information that may have been missing. To reopen the bug, click on the current status under the Status column and change the status back to "New". Thanks.

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