Re: USB module causing lockups? (Was: Strange lockups in X)
* J. Preiss <auba@af-i.de> [2004 Jun 03 08:03 -0500]:
> I know this problem, too. At least at home everything freezes with a chance of
> 50% when I put in an USB drive. This was with kernel 2.4 (with backported usb
> modules from Suse I think) and kernel 2.6 (suse and debian), and usb 1.1.
> With usb 2 it seems to work now .
> Nevertheless, when I copy more than about 50 MB, the hard drive freezes, but
> not the system (only on suse at home, not on debian at work). Ok, its a
> little bit OT, but maybe a hint to the cause of the problem (?)
Not OT at all as far as I'm concerned. I think that you've provided a
bit of confirmation that USB may just be where the problem lies.
Part of the problem is that two weeks ago I made major changes to both
systems. 1) A major update to resync with Testing as I was a few weeks
behind and this resulted in the dfsg version of XFree being installed.
2) I transitioned to Debian packaged kernels in favor of my custom
compiled ones. 3) I began using USB and having the low-level USB
driver module loaded at boot and resident in memory on each machine.
It was easiest to roll back to my older kernels which had worked
flawlessly and the lockups continued (with the USB modules loaded).
So I assumed the Debian kernels were not directly to blame. Yesterday
I hit upon the USB driver angle as I was back-tracking what had changed
prior to the lockup problems. Since rolling back the XFree packages
would prove to be the biggest pain, I hadn't done so. I was a bit
suspicious of the dfsg XFree version since this indicates to me a
completely new development path (fork) and believe it to be a reasonable
assumption that the problem might lay there. Since no one is reporting
these kinds of problems with XFree, it probably is not the cause.
I am running the 2.4.25 Debian kernels on each machine. The 686
version on this laptop and the k7 version on the desktop. Each machine
uses different low-level drivers with this laptop using usb-uhci.o and
the desktop using uhci.o. However, the desktop was more adversely
affected by the lockups. Is one driver buggier than the other? Do
they share some code?
Time will tell if I have found that USB is the source of my problem.
- Nate >>
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