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

[Peter C. Norton]

Have you tried to upgrade the BIOS on your system? ACPI issues are
often cured this way, as well as USB issues (i.e. a server I tested
had timing issues in waiting for devices to re-set, the only fix was
to not have certian keyboards plugged in at start-up).

Also, it's worth looking at lkml to see if the acpi issues for your
board have been addressed recently, or if a fix is known.

-Peter

On Tue, Jun 13, 2006 at 12:57:46AM -0400, Alexander L. Belikoff wrote:
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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
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