Stability-Problem of EHCI with a larger number of USB-Hubs/Devices

[Matthias Schniedermeyer <ms@citd.de>]

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Hi



If you want to skip the introduction, skip to the part after the dashes.

I have a bit larger "net" of USB-Devices currently consisting of 10 
USB-Hubs, 9 USB-Power-Switches and 34 USB-HDDs (normaly switched of by 
the Power-Switches)

The USB-Hubs build a tree-structure with the Power-Switches and USB-HDDs 
as the leafs.
There is one 4-Port-Hub connected to the Root-Hub on a PCI-Add-On 
USB2-Controller.
The first 2 Ports of the first-level-Hub are connected to another level 
of 4-Port hubs following a third-level of "7"-Port Hubs (currently there 
are seven "7"-Port-Hubs). As the "7"-Port Hubs are technically two 
4-Port Hubs they represend the 3th and 4th level in the same physical 
package with HDDs and Power-Switch devices representing leves at the 4th 
or 5th level.

As the Power-Switching-Device i use can switch 4 diffrent Power-Outlets 
there is a Power-Switching-Device connected to every 5th Port counting 
from the first one. On Every other Port a HDD is connected.

The system is designed so that i will have 112 (16*7) "Leave-Ports" for 
88 HDDs and 22 Power-Switch-devices when i would reach maximum capacity.
(Leaving 2 Ports unused, if anyone counted)

I use a self compiled 2.6.17 kernel with the USB-Sub-System as modules, 
so i can load/remove the hcd-drivers. Since the stability has degraded 
ever since at least kernel 2.6.15.

Yesterday i bought a new USB2-Controller card, since there was a 
possibility that the former USB2-Controller card may have been damaged 
by an electrical problem i had a few month ago.

I also replaced all HUB-cables with ones i believe are better quality 
then the former ones as there are "Maybe the  USB cable is bad"-messages 
in the syslog

The new Controller has a NEC-Chipset, which is ohci/ehci.
The former had a VIA-Chipset so it was probably uhci/ehci, but i don't 
have compiled the uhci-driver as the onboard USB-Controller of the 
computer is ohci.

The said computer is:
Dual P3-933Mhz, Serverworks HE-SL chipset, 3GB-RAM
System: Debian-SID, (no UDEV)
cat /proc/version
version 2.6.17 (ms@frontend) (gcc version 4.1.2 20060613 (prerelease) 
(Debian 4.1.1-5)) #31 SMP Sun Jun 18 18:12:58 CEST 2006

------
So much for the introduction:
When i load the ohci_hcd driver i can see the Hub-Ports lighting up,
and everything working fine most of the time, but sometimes only the 
sub-tree connected to the first port of the first-level-hub starts up, 
but after un-/plugging the cabel from the second port that sub-tree is 
initialized fine. With the ehci_hcd i can now use the system without 
problems.

But when i now load the ehci_hcd i can see all lights going out, then 
going on like when the ohci_hcd start and after a few seconds everything 
goes out again and syslog is flooded.

The other way is unplugging and powering-down everything, loading 
ohci_hcd & ehci_hcd, switching on everything and plugging in the cable 
to the first-level hub. This seams to initialize correctly, but breaks 
down a few seconds after everything seamed to be ready.


I've attached a file with the relevant syslog-extract and the config of 
the said kernel.

I did the following to create the log:
- I unplugged the first-level hub and phyically switched off the whole tree
- I loaded the ohci_hcd & ehci_hcd
(usbcore, usb_hid, usb_storage where also loaded, IOW the whole compiled 
USB-Subsystem was loaded)
- Then i switched on everything and plugged in the cable to the first 
level-hub.
- Every light went on, stayed on for a few seconds and then everything 
went down
- I unloaded ehci_hcd & ohci_hcd and stopped the tail on syslog.

Those few seconds provided the 192KB log-file attached.

Technically i have this same problem for at least since 2.6.15, or since 
about the beginning of this year, but it worked most of the time (and 
there were fewer HDDs ...) and i only have to use the system once in a 
while, since i use a S-ATA-"stagging"-HDD to accumulate a few Gigabytes 
before moving them onto the USB-HDDs (which represend >7,5 TB), but it 
gets more and more annoying.

Any ideas what my problem might be?




Bis denn

-- 
Real Programmers consider "what you see is what you get" to be just as
bad a concept in Text Editors as it is in women. No, the Real Programmer
wants a "you asked for it, you got it" text editor -- complicated,
cryptic, powerful, unforgiving, dangerous.


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