USB2 on 5.3 and 5.4

Bob Johnson fbsdlists at gmail.com
Fri Sep 9 16:04:33 PDT 2005


On 9/9/05, Shantanoo Mahajan <shantanoo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> Hardware:
> A7N266 motherbord (USB1.1)
> USB2 PCI card (USB2)
> IDE-USB2 converter
> 
> OS:
> FreeBSD 5.3 and 5.4
> 
> HDD is detected as da0.
> 
> 
> I always get USB1.1. In dmesg speed is shown as 1 Mbps.
> 
> Did 'dd if=/dev/da0 of=/dev/null bs=10240' on one terminal and on other
> one 'iostat -w 1 da0'. The speed shown was not more than 0.8 Mbps.
> 
> The same hardware tested on SuSE Linux 9.3 and Windows XP. Works fine.
> High speed USB.
> 
> Is there any way to get USB2 working? After STFW, got pointers
> suggesting that USB2 will be automatically used if the h/w supports
> it. 

The USB 2 driver is not installed in the generic kernel in 5.3 and 5.4
Release (I haven't checked 5.4 stable or 6.0), so by default you get
only USB 1 speeds.  You can recompile your kernel and add "device
ehci" to the kernel config, or it might be possible for testing to
just do a "kldload ehci".  In 5.3R it is definitely described as "not
finished and is quite buggy" on the man page.

I tried it on my 5.4R laptop, and it locked up.  Then again, the card
I was using it with also seems unstable with the USB 1 driver, so I
don't try to conclude much about the EHCI driver from that.

"man ehci" will tell you a little more.

- Bob


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