On Sat, 21 Jan 2006, Igor Yakushin wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> I just bought a new laptop with AMD 64 bit dual core CPU
> (http://www.compamerica.com/orcax2-64.htm) and configured it dual boot with
> Fedora Core 4 and
> Windows XP. I am having strange problems with USB external drive under Linux:
>
> 1) When the USB external drive or memory stick is plugged, sometimes it gets
> recognized and
> mounted fine and sometimes I get the following errors in dmesg:
> usb 1-5: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 4
> usb 1-5: device not accepting address 4, error -110
> usb 1-5: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 5
> usb 1-5: device not accepting address 5, error -110
> usb 1-5: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 6
> usb 1-5: device not accepting address 6, error -110
> usb 1-5: new high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 7
> usb 1-5: device not accepting address 7, error -110
Looks like your laptop has difficulty communicating with the drive.
> 2) When the drive does get mounted successfully, it works fine for about 10
> minutes but then the
> transfer rate drops to almost zero. I test it as follows:
>
> !/usr/bin/perl
> while(1)
> {
> print "$i\n";
> print `date`;
> print `cp -r /home/test /media/usbdisk/`;
> print `date`;
> print `rm -rf /media/usbdisk/test`;
> }
This is not a good test. Mainly you are measuring the computer's buffer
capacity, not the transfer speed to the drive. "hdparm -t" does a better
job.
> First several iterations usually take about 3 minutes to copy 6 GB which,
> though is not the
> promised 480 Mbits/s, is still quite fast and obviously USB2.0, not USB1.1 (I
> guess, there are
> some other bottlenecks that do not allow to reach the top USB2 speed). After
> a while the transfer
> rate slows down by about a factor of 20 and it becomes almost impossible to
> work with a drive. I
> ran iostat -kx -d 5 in another window and observe that await keeps growing
> for the USB drive. It
> is like there is some kind of buffer or queue that keeps growing.
As I said.
> I do not have any trouble using the same drive (Maxtor 300GB, 7200 rpms,
> installed into MadDog
> USB2.0 enclosure) with another laptop (also running Fedora Core 4 but 32
> bit), so it is not the
> drive or the cable problem. Also, I tried another similar drive partitioned
> half ext3 and half
> ntfs. Same problem under Linux but the same burn test seems to work fine with
> windows half of the
> drive. So most likely it is not a hardware problem with my laptop.
Don't be so sure about that. I have a USB drive and cable that don't work
on one computer. Switching any one of the three (drive, cable, or
computer) makes things work again.
You're probably getting a lot of communication errors. Have you looked
for error messages in the system log?
> I use the original kernel from Fedora Core 4 x86_64 DVD:
> ===========================
> uname -a
> Linux orca 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4smp #1 SMP Thu Jun 2 23:16:33 EDT 2005 x86_64
> x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
> ===========================
> I tried using new 2.6.14-1.1656_FC4smp kernel but my laptop did not behave
> with it: it would
> freeze after a few minutes and I had to push power button. So I switched back
> to
> 2.6.11-1.1369_FC4smp and it works fine except for USB.
>
> I also tried to compile 2.6.15.1 kernel. Same USB problems but it takes more
> iterations to slow
> down the transfer rate. Also with the new kernel it seems not only slow down
> the rate but
> completely unmount USB drive after a while.
That's what eventually happens when communication errors get bad enough.
Alan Stern
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