Hi all!

Just out of curiosity bought a cheap 6-port USB2 card so i could maybe get my frontpanel USB connectors working and put to use. After a while this didn't really seem to be a good idea.

I got the card working nicely under linux, but it also then started to crash the machine randomly with memory related errors. Well i blamed my memory module (512MB DDR 400Mhz CL2.5) and under Morphos (V1.4) ran memtest to see two addresses which acted weirdly. After replacing the memory module the errors still were there.

Apparently current OF initializes the USB2 card and in the same time trashes the ram with the cards control registers (Thanks Piru! . Luckily this was fixed in MOS 1.4.5 update. Linux however did not have such a fix and memtester reported errors and the damn thing kept crashing and throwing seg faults at my face.

So now i live happily without the USB2 card and tried to run my system with 2 512MB memory modules. As others have reported the memtesters dont report any errors, but still linux like to crash a lot and under MOS Trance busy-loops a lot after a while. So had to take the other memory module out too. Been a busy weekend :-]

Any OF updates around? 050404 is the one i use now.

Compile your kernel to include EHCI USB drivers (these are NOT standard in Debian etc.) and everything will turn out fine.

There is a new firmware on the way which deinitialises the card on OS boot, leaving it dormant and ready for OS drivers to reconfigure it properly. No idea on timeframe though, I was personally hoping we would have had it by now.

This is an urgent issue for us since the ODW/Smart Card bundles now come with a USB2 card, of course. Rest assured we want to fix it as much as you want a fix.

I have the EHCI and UHCI drivers compiled as modules, but you seem to mean that they need to be inside the kernel bootimage right away, am i right?

I'll give it one more shot when i get home from work :-]

No, he is wrong, you just need to load ehci before uhci or ohci.

On debian you need the initrd-tools 0.1.82 i just uploaded yesterday
installed, and you need to reconfigure your kernel image with :

dpkg-reconfigure linux-image-2.6.12-1-powerpc

(be carefull though, since the 2.6.12-3 package is bugged, you need either -2
or the upcoming -4 which should be in the archive this evening).

Friendly,

Sven Luther

Didn't mention i run Gentoo here and using kernel 2.6.12-gentoo-r8 now.

And in /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 i have UHCI being run before EHCI so i'll switch those and see what happends when i get home later.

Well, that didn't help.

One more idea is to compile the kernel to have the EHCI driver built-in and use the UHCI as module. Think it might work?

I'll try... if doesn't help i'll give 230V from the wall to the USB2 card

Didn't work. Maybe the brand of the card is bad.

Aug 16 21:46:55 pegasos ehci_hcd 0000:00:05.3: ALi Corporation USB 2.0 Controller
Aug 16 21:46:55 pegasos ehci_hcd 0000:00:05.3: debug port 1
Aug 16 21:46:55 pegasos ehci_hcd 0000:00:05.3: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1
Aug 16 21:46:55 pegasos ehci_hcd 0000:00:05.3: irq 9, io mem 0x80003800
Aug 16 21:46:55 pegasos ehci_hcd 0000:00:05.3: USB 2.0 initialized, EHCI 1.00, driver 10 Dec 2004

Going to live without it. And waiting for the OF update then
Good night to all now!

When using current OFW with usb-enable? true, you should have UHCI & OHCI driver installed in your OS.
Just use latest MorphOS or any OS which is UHCI and OHCI aware.
You can also disable the USB support into the OFW if you don't need it (I guess many people are not using USB keyboard);

Your sincerly
Nicolas DET

Few problems; people do use USB keyboards. Using MorphOS doesn't help a guy running Linux. Also we have evidence that OHCI and UHCI drivers don't fix the error (internal Pegasos USB is UHCI but the NEC card we ship is OHCI compatible apparently.. the OHCI driver loads but the system is still unstable somehow).