New USB drivers

[Kevin Oberman]

I have now been running the Hans Petter's USB drivers for about a week
and they have been working pretty well.

That said, I have seen two things that concern me.

1. Today I connected a USB disk to the system. It ran fine, but then I
   dismounted it (using nautilus and hald), the window informing me that
   the device could be safely removed popped up and I unplugged the
   drive. 

   At that point, my system live-locked. I did see some updates to
   windows, but I could not change focus to a different window nor could
   I move to a different desktop. I tried CTRL-ALT-BS to kill X, but it
   would not work. I tried CTRL-ALT-DEL to reboot the system. No joy.

   The system was at least partly alive as the disk activity LED would
   flash now and then. I eventually had to power-cycle it. :-( As a
   result I have pretty much no information to help track this one down.

2. I use dd to mirror my system disk on a weekly basis. I track the
   performance of dd during this operation and, with no other changes
   than  the USB stack being added to the kernel, the average transfer
   rate  dropped from 17.43 MB to 17.15 MB. Not huge, but quite
   noticeable when copying an 80 GB drive.

   I run this in single-user mode with no partitions mounted (except
   root mounted read-only), so USB previously had not even been loaded,
   so the old drivers may have had even a greater impact. And the
   difference may not be the USB stack, but nothing else was changed.

It will take more time to tell if there is a real problem here, but I
wanted to provide a little (very little, I admit) information on my
experience. 

Thanks, Hans, for all of your work on this.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634
Key fingerprint:059B 2DDF 031C 9BA3 14A4  EADA 927D EBB3 987B 3751
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