USB disk on CS5536 unstable

[Anselm Strauss]

On 09/30/10 21:38, Hans Petter Selasky wrote:
> On Thursday 30 September 2010 21:10:59 Anselm Strauss wrote:
>> Maybe sending it to just the USB list was too specific ...
>>
>> On 09/30/10 00:08, Anselm Strauss wrote:
>>> Hi
>>>
>>> I have an ALIX board that has an AMD Geode and the CS5536 companion chip
>>> with integrated USB on it. When I connect a USB disk I have observed
>>> various problems. For example when I run fsck_ufs on a 250 GB partition
>>> the process gets stuck in biord state and fsck reports unreadable
>>> sectors. When I do a dd over the whole disk and direct it to /dev/null
>>> it suddenly returns with no error, but having read only a small fraction
>>> of the disk. I tried it with two different disks and two different ALIX
>>> boards. I'm pretty sure the disks are okay since I tried them on other
>>> hardware.
>>>
>>> As far as I know there was some trouble with the chip regarding
>>> timeouts. Under load after some time the USB just stops responding. I
>>> have tried 8.0 and 8.1. Is there any known problem? How can I track this
>>> down?
>>>
>>> Anselm
> 
> If you compile the kernel with USB_DEBUG, then there are some sysctls under 
> hw.usb.ehci which you can tweak. Needs to be set before boot.
> 
> --HPS

Did not know that there were configurable bug workarounds in sysctl.
When I set hw.usb.ehci.lostintrbug=1 in /boot/loader.conf the problems
seem gone.

Without this setting I got the following kernel message when dd did abort:

ehci_timeout: xfer=0xc29cd3c8


Thanks,
Anselm