Re: Lock up's on USB transfer

[Swift Griggs <swift.griggs%coloradovnet.com@localhost>]

On Thu, 11 Sep 2008, Marko Schütz wrote:
> On both I use (different) USB hard disks to which I regularly backup using 
> rsync.

FWIW, ext2/ffs/ntfs(ro) all work perfectly on USB in my experience. It's only 
FAT devices that act up.

> Have you excluded other causes?

Well, since you mentioned several FAT based devices, I think it could also be 
isolated to certain USB chipsets or target devices. For example, on my Dell 
Inspiron 530s I can read/write to a FAT formatted USB SanDisk Cruzer just fine, 
but if try to write a few small files to a USB floppy disk drive the machine 
locks so hard I can't even turn off the numlock or capslock and the mousecursor 
freezes in place. I've also had tons of trouble with the 4.0 release's USB on 
an ATI SB600 based system with an ATI USB chipset. I seem to see the behavior 
much less on Intel based USB chipsets. The one with UHCI PCI code of 0x2937 
seems to be one of the best, but it still locks up with FAT+USB floppy devices.

Should I try to boot with a debug-kernel and see if I can get a stack trace 
from a serial terminal when it craters?

Thanks,
  Swift
--
Swift Griggs -- <swift.griggs%coloradovnet.com@localhost>
Unix Systems Administrator