Comment 50 for bug 256767

On Wed, Dec 02, 2009, Will Marler wrote:
> This bug is not a duplicate of #54273.

I have unmarked the duplicate and changed the title of this bug slightly.

> This is not a trivial bug, because, as has been previously mentioned, it makes the syslog useless for all reasonable purposes. You cannot "tail -f" watch it for output when troubleshooting other issues

For reference, you can still do:

# tail -f /var/log/syslog | grep -v "unable to enumerate"

That certainly doesn't mean it's not very annoying though: that trick does not apply to consoles, so consoles are essentially impossible to use as anything interesting gets overwritten by once a second USB errors.

> Isn't there even a workaround available?

I have not found one other than unloading the module (prior to Ubuntu Karmic) or disabling the device through /proc (since the support seems to be built in in Karmic). This is not satisfactory, since the side-effect is disabling the device itself.

There's some discussion on the linux kernel mailing list, see for
example:

Patch originally adding error message:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/4/29/401

Linus Torvalds reports seeing this message frequently logged:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/4/25/485

Alan Stern acknowledged that the message may appear "frequently" but is
"harmless":
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/4/26/217

Patch submitted to limit the appearance of the message:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/10/23/449 and following

Alan Stern replies that he'd rather not "paper over" the message and
that it is due to userspace loading the drivers in the wrong order:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2008/10/24/209