Troubles with USB

[Julio Merino]

Hello,

I've got this PowerMac G5, dual 2 Ghz, water-cooled. I was able to install
FreeBSD 13 BETA2 just fine a few weeks ago from a USB stick. I plugged that
in, typed "boot hd:,\\:tbxi" and everything was flawless.

Since then, I installed a second hard drive on the machine and increased
the RAM from the 2GB it came with to 10GB. And FreeBSD has been running
just fine with these upgrades: no trouble whatsoever during a buildworld,
for example, and happily acting as a file server. Using a USB keyboard on
the machine works fine too.

However, here is where the strangeness starts. I want to repartition the
boot (SSD) drive now... and I just cannot get the installer to work again.
Using the same image as before and the same USB stick, the installation
kernel loads without issues from OpenFirmware... but as soon as it starts
loading /sbin/init, things start failing left and right. It feels as if
there is I/O corruption when reading from the USB drive given that the
system reports "invalid binary files" and segfaults everywhere. (I tried
with another drive and found the same problem. I'm pretty sure the drive is
good given that it can be read from another system.)

So... I booted the G5 again from the already-installed system, which
thankfully still works.

Upon boot, if the problematic USB is already plugged in, it's found:

Mar  7 15:51:03 g5 kernel: da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 scbus6 target 0 lun 0
Mar  7 15:51:03 g5 kernel: da0: <PI-145 1394/USB20 Drive 2.65> Fixed Direct
Access SCSI device
Mar  7 15:51:03 g5 kernel: da0: Serial Number 00101005405EC52D
Mar  7 15:51:03 g5 kernel: da0: 40.000MB/s transfers
Mar  7 15:51:03 g5 kernel: da0: 152627MB (312581808 512 byte sectors)
Mar  7 15:51:03 g5 kernel: da0: quirks=0x2<NO_6_BYTE>

but attempts to access it are worthless: gpart returns nothing, and reading
from it seems to return all zeroes.

Other times though, or when replugging the USB drive as the system is
running, I get errors like:

Mar  7 16:00:58 g5 kernel: Root mount waiting for: usbus2
Mar  7 16:00:58 g5 kernel: uhub_reattach_port: device problem
(USB_ERR_TIMEOUT), disabling port 1

Mar  7 16:06:38 g5 kernel: usbd_setup_device_desc: getting device
descriptor at addr 2 failed, USB_ERR_TIMEOUT
Mar  7 16:06:40 g5 kernel: usbd_req_re_enumerate: addr=2, set address
failed! (USB_ERR_TIMEOUT, ignored)
Mar  7 16:06:49 g5 kernel: usbd_setup_device_desc: getting device
descriptor at addr 2 failed, USB_ERR_TIMEOUT
Mar  7 16:06:51 g5 kernel: usbd_req_re_enumerate: addr=2, set address
failed! (USB_ERR_TIMEOUT, ignored)

and this sometimes also causes the keyboard to stop responding (but ssh
continues to work).

I obviously tried to remove the extra HDD and RAM I installed... but no
difference.

Any ideas as to what may be happening? It's very strange that the USB
drives work well from OpenFirmware but then stop working when the kernel is
loaded... and it's even more strange that they worked fine weeks ago and
don't any more.

Thanks!

-- 
jmmv.dev