Comment 466 for bug 88746

>So, Hated On Mostly, with the patch you posted on ubuntuforums we can have USB 2.0 transferts in flash drives, but >the CD drive start working even if you don't use it?

The patch works for me, but not as good as a live CD Ubuntu v8.04.1. It will pause sometimes during a transfer, but usually the speed recovers and finishes the transfer. The patch just disables sync mode for USB devices. Definitely not a perfect fix, but it might get you by. I am going to use the patch long enough to backup my data and redo my system. Unreliable USB transfers is unacceptable so I can't run my system in this state and the patch is not a good fix for a production system.

The problem with the solution I posted is that it was designed to solve the problem for opensuse versions 9.3-10.0 and thus is several years old. Yes this bug is several years old and across multiple distributions (I have seen this problem mentioned for Debian, Mandriva, Fedora, Suse/Opensuse and a few others I forget) if you check out some of those links from the ubuntuforums. I think the oldest complaint I saw about slow/buggy usb transfers is from 2002!

There was another usb bug/ehci bug on here that showed a whole bunch of problems with each tiny change in the 2.6.24-x series and then the Ubuntu Kernel Team regressed the changes which broke everything for 2.6.24-19 which is the kernel in the default install of 8.04.1.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/212660
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/212660/comments/19

It's crazy that USB can be so broken between the smallest updates and it goes completely unacknowledge by so many developers across distributions, but that is where we are right now.

My next step is to install 8.04.1, lock the kernel, update it to intrepid via alternate CD and see what happens. If it breaks then I have to switch to BSD or Mac OSX depending on whether or not I can get whole disk encryption setup properly with BSD.