USB driver questions

From: Muncher (nowhere_at_nowhere.com)
Date: 07/31/04 

Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2004 01:17:49 -0500

I have an AMD64/Gigabyte system with Debian Woody that has been very
stable - until I started adding USB devices.

With the just the usb-uhci driver which limited me to 1.1 speed, it worked
well except for being slower than Xmas.

When I tried to move to USB 2.0 High Speed with the ehci-hcd driver,
things went south in a hurry. When it worked, it was fast, but very often
on a mount it did a Windows style total lockup. Totally... Even the num
and caps lock keys on the keyboard stopped working. Sometimes even when
just typing in dmesg to see what it found. Or halfway through a file
transfer the connection would error out with multiple IO errors and would
never connect again until a reboot - got to thinking that I was back in
the bad old Win98 days:(( Apparently it siezes up so fast that no error
logs are written. I assume that the problem is caused by the ehci-hcd
driver.

Googling on this found the problem, just not the answer - in fact there is
so much on USB/Linux lockups that with my current Linux knowledge I am not
sure where to even start for troubleshooting. One poster swears that he
fixed the same problem by removing usb-uhci and just using ehci-hcd but my
reading says that usb-uhci is not optional. Plus, when I tried it, usb
was dead.

The above is not a major problem since it is on my personal machine and I
am still in learning mode and at least USB 1.1 mode works pretty well.
But it sure takes a long time to back up a hard drive a 12mbs.

Suggestions anyone?

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