Unable to mount USB3 drives on 376.47

[goncalossilva]

Hello!

Yesterday I upgraded from 374.43_2 to 376.47. Did a factory reset and manually updated the necessary settings.

The problem is: I can't get my USB3 drives to mount. They worked wonderfully on 374.43_2.

My setup has one pen drive connected to the USB2 port, and a hub with 2 USB3 drives connected the the USB3 port. One of the drives is NTFS and the other has 2 partitions: one NTFS and another HFS+ (Time Machine).

After reading that others are having the same issues with 376.47 and that disabling "Reduce USB 3.0 Interference" might help, I gave it a shot. The first drive (single, NTFS) mounted right away. The other (dual, NTFS / HFS+) didn't.

My log doesn't show me anything special except for a few lines like this:
"USB /dev/sdc3(hfs) failed to mount at the first try!" (one for each unmounted drive)

I have a few questions:

• Is a fix for this on the horizon? 374.34 worked perfectly regarding this, but I love some of the new features of 376.47 :/
• My router is currently set in Repeater mode. Like this, I don't have access to the "Reduce USB 3.0 Interference" option so not even the NTFS disk works. Can I change this using nvram?
• The output of "nvram show" contains entries regarding USB speed, such as: "usb_path1.3_speed=480". All of the values are 480. Is this correct? Shouldn't I have some "5120" values for the drives connected to the USB3 port? Could this be related to the problem?

Thanks!

EDIT: I've also noticed RMerlin is running a beta of 376.48. I haven't tried this build, but I checked the changelog and didn't see anything that could be related to this problem.

 

[goncalossilva]

Well, I guess I don't need a fix

Finally got this working. After further testing, I noticed I was able to mount the partitions manually if I didn't use any options. Here are some findings:
- Neither "ufsd" nor "auto" are completely reliable in my fstab configuration, so now I'm using explicit types for all partitions;
- The new NTFS has some different mount options from the previous one, so I had to make some adjustments to avoid mounting errors.

My other two questions remain, although I'm really happy to have found the cause of the problem. Hope it helps others!

 

[RMerlin]

Well, I guess I don't need a fix

Finally got this working. After further testing, I noticed I was able to mount the partitions manually if I didn't use any options. Here are some findings:
- Neither "ufsd" nor "auto" are completely reliable in my fstab configuration, so now I'm using explicit types for all partitions;
- The new NTFS has some different mount options from the previous one, so I had to make some adjustments to avoid mounting errors.

My other two questions remain, although I'm really happy to have found the cause of the problem. Hope it helps others!

Note that the new NTFS driver from Tuxera is also called tntfs instead of ufsd.

 

[goncalossilva]

Note that the new NTFS driver from Tuxera is also called tntfs instead of ufsd.

Yes, that it exactly what I'm using in my current fstab file "ext4" and "tntfs", those are what I use. Either way, thanks for the heads up!

I also found out how to disable "Reduce USB 3 interference": nvram set usb_usb3

Do you have any ideas regarding the other question? Kind of odd seeing so many 480 there

 

[RMerlin]

Yes, that it exactly what I'm using in my current fstab file "ext4" and "tntfs", those are what I use. Either way, thanks for the heads up!

I also found out how to disable "Reduce USB 3 interference": nvram set usb_usb3

Do you have any ideas regarding the other question? Kind of odd seeing so many 480 there

No idea. Mine shows 5000 here.

You can also manually check using

cat /proc/bus/usb/devices

However that doesn't seem to fully work either, since it reports "??" as its speed here.

 

[goncalossilva]

No idea. Mine shows 5000 here.

You can also manually check using

cat /proc/bus/usb/devices

However that doesn't seem to fully work either, since it reports "??" as its speed here.

Mine is definitely wrong.

admin@RT-AC68U-B250:/tmp/home/root# nvram show | grep _speed
usb_path1.4_speed=480
usb_path2_speed=480
usb_path1.3_speed=480

And running the command you mentioned shows a bunch of entries. Some have indeed "??" speeds, but I recognize the devices connected to the USB3 port (one USB3 hub, 2 USB3 disks) and they all show

Spd=480

.

Any ideas in how I can fix this? Could changing one of the values using nvram fix the issue?

 

[goncalossilva]

It seems to me my USB3 Hub is being recognized as a USB2 Hub:

T:  Bus=02 Lev=01 Prnt=01 Port=00 Cnt=01 Dev#=  2 Spd=480 MxCh= 4
D:  Ver= 2.00 Cls=09(hub  ) Sub=00 Prot=02 MxPS=64 #Cfgs=  1
P:  Vendor=05e3 ProdID=0610 Rev= 3.01
S:  Manufacturer=GenesysLogic
S:  Product=USB2.0 Hub

This hub is USB3. I'm unsure if this is related with the problem, but I guess it might be.

 

[RMerlin]

It seems to me my USB3 Hub is being recognized as a USB2 Hub:

T:  Bus=02 Lev=01 Prnt=01 Port=00 Cnt=01 Dev#=  2 Spd=480 MxCh= 4
D:  Ver= 2.00 Cls=09(hub  ) Sub=00 Prot=02 MxPS=64 #Cfgs=  1
P:  Vendor=05e3 ProdID=0610 Rev= 3.01
S:  Manufacturer=GenesysLogic
S:  Product=USB2.0 Hub

This hub is USB3. I'm unsure if this is related with the problem, but I guess it might be.

USB 3.0 hubs are not officially supported by Asus.

 

[goncalossilva]

USB 3.0 hubs are not officially supported by Asus.

After making the disks work again (my original problem) I kept digging because my read/write speeds are around 10/11MBps, with or without the hub, when they were >25MBps with the hub on the previous build (last 374).

I'm not saying the hub was recognized as USB3 before, as I didn't check it... Just that something is up

 

[goncalossilva]

After digging around (a lot) I finally thought I had figured this out.

There's this entry in my syslog file:

Jan  1 00:00:14 kernel: xhci_hcd 0000:00:0b.0: xHCI Host Controller
Jan  1 00:00:14 kernel: xhci_hcd 0000:00:0b.0: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1
Jan  1 00:00:14 kernel: xhci_hcd 0000:00:0b.0: irq 112, io mem 0x18023000
Jan  1 00:00:14 kernel: xhci_hcd 0000:00:0b.0: Failed to enable MSI-X
Jan  1 00:00:14 kernel: xhci_hcd 0000:00:0b.0: failed to allocate MSI entry
[B]Jan  1 00:00:14 kernel: usb usb1: No SuperSpeed endpoint companion for config 1  interface 0 altsetting 0 ep 129: using minimum values[/B]

I have highlighted what I thought to be the problem. There seemed to be a xhci bug which prevents the USB port from working in SuperSpeed mode in 2.6.36.

The fix is this: https://gitorious.org/linux-omap-dss2/linux/commit/6dd0a3a7e0793dbeae1b951f091025d8cf896cb4

However, I noticed the kernel code used in your latest build contains this fix... Added in 03c5a3272398ac3284d1101cd53a56b6d36fb1ff. So I'm out of ideas