[nylug-talk] 2.6 kernel, USB card reader, and ACPI woes

[Alexander L. Belikoff]

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Hi everyone -

Recently I installed a nifty floppy drive with integrated USB
multi-card reader and it started giving my well-oiled system some
problems...

The card reader part connects to the on-board USB header and it works
OK in both Linux and Windows. However it is the Linux boot that is no
longer the same: any 2.6 kernel flavor I tried (my stock SuSE 9.3,
Debian, Ubuntu, FC5 - the latter two in the installer only) locks my
computer up during the boot process while apparently dealing with ACPI
issues.

So far, the solution was to turn ACPI off (passing *acpi=off* on the
kernel command line) - this allows the kernel to boot and operate.
However, this disables ACPI and brings some additional annoyances -
for example, when ACPI is disabled, a 2.6 kernel will no longer power
the system off properly - it will just lock it up at the end after
telling me that the system has been halted.

There was yet another solution I found on some obscure forum: disable
legacy USB support in BIOS. Again, this is far from perfect: when
turned on, a USB keyboard will no longer work in GRUB!

Thus, question is: can anyone suggest some way to deal with such
problems? It is still somewhat incomprehensible for me how a /USB/
device can affect the non-USB-specific subsystem in the kernel to make
it lock up and how no one else asked about it (even though there are
plenty of screams around the Net about ACPI lock-ups). Is there some
magic command-line argument to make 2.6 happy about the crad reader?
Strangely, 2.4 kernel works fine.

Thanks in advance,

- --
Alexander L. Belikoff                          http://www.belikoff.net
PGP/GPG fingerprint: 907E E5C6 7BA7 195A 5B38  0DD4 E14F 9428 C03A 787A
(http://pgp.mit.edu for the key)

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