USB disk on CS5536 unstable

[Hans Petter Selasky]

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