Kirya [.net]

01 Jun, 2008

USB card reader and USB power management

Posted by: Julien @ 10:06:16

I have received a brand new USB card reader.

At first sight, everything was working well “out of the box”, but when I have checked the log files, I could see the following lines repeated very frequently:

Jun  1 08:22:08 athyr kernel: [ 1412.134045] usb 6-2: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 3

I repeat everything seems to work OK, but I can’t stand this kind of messages, especially when it deals with storage (by experience, everything works well during the tests, you simply ignore error messages, and you loose your data the first time you really use your hardware!).


After some googling, I have found this issue is hardware related. A lot of people seem to get hit by this. Some have even reverted to USB 1 (UHCI)!

Further googling pointed out this article.

I have tried to disable USB auto-suspend, and changing the idle-delay time (default is 2 seconds). But it doesn’t help.

Just for reference, this can be done like this:
echo -1 > /sys/module/usbcore/parameters/autosuspend

Note the following part of the documentation:
The idle-delay values for already existing devices will not be affected

To make the change permanent, you need to append usbcore.autosuspend=-1 to the boot parameters (USB support is compiled into Debian kernels).
More information on: http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/usb/power-management.txt

I can also see the following message at boot time:

unable to enumerate USB device on port 4

According to this recent discussion, it seems it is harmless.

I have however noticed that unplugging the card reader and re-plugging it after the system has booted make these log entries disappear. Does someone have an idea?

Note that I use the latest Debian 2.6.25 kernel:

$ uname -a
Linux athyr 2.6.25-2-amd64 #1 SMP Tue May 27 12:45:24 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux

3 Responses to "USB card reader and USB power management"

1 | Julien

June 2nd, 2008 at 8:28 pm

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I have just noticed that if I let the system issue these errors, I get other errors after a (long) while:
[ 2478.872720] usb 2-3: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 2
[ 2478.901695] usb 2-3: can’t restore configuration #1 (error=-71)
[ 2478.901716] usb 2-3: USB disconnect, address 2
[ 2478.901880] sd 0:0:0:3: [sde] READ CAPACITY failed
[ 2478.901881] sd 0:0:0:3: [sde] Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_OK,SUGGEST_OK
[ 2478.901885] sd 0:0:0:3: [sde] Sense not available.
[ 2478.901923] sd 0:0:0:3: [sde] Write Protect is off
[ 2478.901926] sd 0:0:0:3: [sde] Mode Sense: 00 00 00 00
[ 2478.901928] sd 0:0:0:3: [sde] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 2478.902078] sd 0:0:0:3: [sde] READ CAPACITY failed
[ 2478.902079] sd 0:0:0:3: [sde] Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_OK,SUGGEST_OK
[ 2478.902082] sd 0:0:0:3: [sde] Sense not available.
[ 2478.902119] sd 0:0:0:3: [sde] Write Protect is off
[ 2478.902121] sd 0:0:0:3: [sde] Mode Sense: 00 00 00 00
[ 2478.902123] sd 0:0:0:3: [sde] Assuming drive cache: write through
[ 2478.992731] usb 2-3: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4

while there is no card in sde

2 | Jason Lewis

June 6th, 2008 at 3:49 am

Avatar

Hi Julien,

I just thought I’d let you know that I also get those errors with a 3.5″ usb multi card reader that I recently bought. Howerver I found that it eventually crashed the USB subsystem on my computer which prevented me from accessing my USB external hdd.

I have removed the offending device until I either buy another one or find a solution.

Jason

3 | Julien

June 6th, 2008 at 6:43 am

Avatar

Hi Jason,

I have reported this issue on bugzilla.kernel.org.

Maybe you could add your comment there if you feel our both issues have similar causes?

Cheers,
Julien


  • Julien: Hi Jason, I have reported this issue on bugzilla.kernel.org. Maybe
  • Jason Lewis: Hi Julien, I just thought I'd let you know that I also get those errors with a 3.5" usb multi card reader that I recently bought. Howerver I found
  • Julien: I have just noticed that if I let the system issue these errors, I get other errors after a (long) while: [ 2478.872720] usb 2-3: reset high sp

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