Hello:
Today I received a Lexar USB2.0 Card Reader. I tried connecting it to an FC1 box (kernel 2.4.2.2129.nptl) with an AMD Duron processor (1.4 GHz). Immediately upon connecting, the system queries the floppy and two existing SCSI devices (an Iomega Jaz drive and a CD burner). Then, inexplicably, the machine hangs and I have to do an uncontrolled (and, needless to say, unclean) shutdown.
However, my HP Digital PhotoSmart 120 camera connects without a hitch and, using gtkam, I can save and delete photographs with the camera connected.
I tried looking up some instructions for kernel modification, and I know I have a good tool for it (menuconfig) and also the kernel source code. How can I get the reader to connect and mount up without bringing the whole system to a crashing halt? Does FC1 have a special vulnerability that FC2 does not have?
I'd really like to know how to fix this, because I'd like to recommend a digital-photography solution to a client of mine. Of course he could probably use gtkam to save his photos straight from the camera, but if he could simply shove the card into a reader and use Nautilus (or even the bash cp command) to pull off his photos to a directory of his own choosing, that would be a lot more convenient for his operations, as I'm sure everybody can appreciate. (He runs a pathology laboratory and would like to take gross photographs and photomicrographs for inclusion in his reports--and he could do that a lot faster if all he had to do was pop out a card and stick it into a reader while he shoves another, blank card into the camera so that he can keep going. And when he's dealing with frozen-section diagnosis, speed is of the essence!)
Temlakos
On Thu, 30 Sep 2004, Mike Burger wrote:
I can't speak to the Lexar units, but I'm using the SmartDisk 6-In-1 reader with FC2. The OS saw the unit right away, but I had to add:
options scsi_mod max_luns=255
to my /etc/modprobe.conf go get it to see all of the slots.
that's what i used for my lexar 8-in-1. actually, you don't need to get that carried away (although it may make no effective difference). from what i can tell, you only need to specify for max_luns the actual number of physical slots on the unit. can anyone clarify this? just based on what i've seen, each physical slot corresponds to a LUN, so i set mine to 3 and it's worked fine.
rday
On Wed, 29 Sep 2004, Temlakos wrote:
Hello:
Today I received a Lexar USB2.0 Card Reader. I tried connecting it to an FC1 box (kernel 2.4.2.2129.nptl) with an AMD Duron processor (1.4 GHz). Immediately upon connecting, the system queries the floppy and two existing SCSI devices (an Iomega Jaz drive and a CD burner). Then, inexplicably, the machine hangs and I have to do an uncontrolled (and, needless to say, unclean) shutdown.
However, my HP Digital PhotoSmart 120 camera connects without a hitch and, using gtkam, I can save and delete photographs with the camera connected.
I tried looking up some instructions for kernel modification, and I know I have a good tool for it (menuconfig) and also the kernel source code. How can I get the reader to connect and mount up without bringing the whole system to a crashing halt? Does FC1 have a special vulnerability that FC2 does not have?
I'd really like to know how to fix this, because I'd like to recommend a digital-photography solution to a client of mine. Of course he could probably use gtkam to save his photos straight from the camera, but if he could simply shove the card into a reader and use Nautilus (or even the bash cp command) to pull off his photos to a directory of his own choosing, that would be a lot more convenient for his operations, as I'm sure everybody can appreciate. (He runs a pathology laboratory and would like to take gross photographs and photomicrographs for inclusion in his reports--and he could do that a lot faster if all he had to do was pop out a card and stick it into a reader while he shoves another, blank card into the camera so that he can keep going. And when he's dealing with frozen-section diagnosis, speed is of the essence!)
I can't speak to the Lexar units, but I'm using the SmartDisk 6-In-1 reader with FC2. The OS saw the unit right away, but I had to add:
options scsi_mod max_luns=255
to my /etc/modprobe.conf go get it to see all of the slots.
On Thu, 30 Sep 2004, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
On Thu, 30 Sep 2004, Mike Burger wrote:
I can't speak to the Lexar units, but I'm using the SmartDisk 6-In-1 reader with FC2. The OS saw the unit right away, but I had to add:
options scsi_mod max_luns=255
to my /etc/modprobe.conf go get it to see all of the slots.
that's what i used for my lexar 8-in-1. actually, you don't need to get that carried away (although it may make no effective difference). from what i can tell, you only need to specify for max_luns the actual number of physical slots on the unit. can anyone clarify this? just based on what i've seen, each physical slot corresponds to a LUN, so i set mine to 3 and it's worked fine.
That would probably work, too...I just used 255 as that's what I was given as a workaround when I entered a bugzilla report on it. Seems that the unit I have doesn't actually identify itself with any meaningful info, so it's not in the actual device database.
On Thu, 2004-09-30 at 08:27, Mike Burger wrote:
I can't speak to the Lexar units, but I'm using the SmartDisk 6-In-1 reader with FC2. The OS saw the unit right away, but I had to add:
options scsi_mod max_luns=255
to my /etc/modprobe.conf go get it to see all of the slots.
Well, as to that, if I could get the reader not to crash the system (I wonder whether it's an architectural mismatch--AMD Duron not quite being an "athlon" or a "686"?), I would modify the kernel to "probe all LUN's in any SCSI device." That's the solution to the multi-card-reader problem that I heard elsewhere.
I suspect that my solution might have to wait until I can build a machine based on a PIII or P4, where the kernel will match the architectures. Weird--that the digital camera won't crash the system, but the card reader does.
Temlakos
Temlakos wrote:
(I wonder whether it's an architectural mismatch--AMD Duron not quite being an "athlon" or a "686"?),
I'm not quite sure what your point is there: I can't see any other mentions of Athlons or i686s, but a Duron is simply an Athlon with less level 2 cache [1]. Architecturally, and from a compatibility point of view, they should be identical, and fully compatible with kernels compiled for "i686" machines.
James.
[1] OK, it got slower bus speeds than some Athlons...
James:
Frankly I'm stumbling in the dark here, trying to figure out why, every time I connect this card reader with a card inserted to a box running Fedora Core 1, the whole system hangs. I thought that maybe the processor had something to do with it--but it also crashes my old Gateway Solo 2500SE with the Pentium 233-MHz processor, so the AMD Athlon/Duron issue can't be it.
The symptoms are these: The box probes every drive connected to it, including the floppy and the CD-ROM and any other physical devices. Then, suddenly, it starts flashing the CAPS LOCK and NUM LOCK lights, the mouse won't respond, and in general I need to execute an uncontrolled, unclean shutdown.
Temlakos
On Thu, 2004-09-30 at 19:36, James Wilkinson wrote:
Temlakos wrote:
(I wonder whether it's an architectural mismatch--AMD Duron not quite being an "athlon" or a "686"?),
I'm not quite sure what your point is there: I can't see any other mentions of Athlons or i686s, but a Duron is simply an Athlon with less level 2 cache [1]. Architecturally, and from a compatibility point of view, they should be identical, and fully compatible with kernels compiled for "i686" machines.
James.
Temlakos wrote:
Frankly I'm stumbling in the dark here, trying to figure out why, every time I connect this card reader with a card inserted to a box running Fedora Core 1, the whole system hangs. I thought that maybe the processor had something to do with it--but it also crashes my old Gateway Solo 2500SE with the Pentium 233-MHz processor, so the AMD Athlon/Duron issue can't be it.
The symptoms are these: The box probes every drive connected to it, including the floppy and the CD-ROM and any other physical devices. Then, suddenly, it starts flashing the CAPS LOCK and NUM LOCK lights, the mouse won't respond, and in general I need to execute an uncontrolled, unclean shutdown.
What happens if you press Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get to a text terminal, then connect the card reader?
It throughly sounds as though you've got a kernel panic.
James.
I tried the below procedure.
At first it said something about not having something-or-other in place--I can't recall what, because when everything froze, I lost it all. I recall that it recognized the reader as a Lexar, but then kept saying that USB drivers were timing out. And then suddenly it poured out a lot of gibberish, ending in a string of hex codes that I can't possibly recall--ending with the phrase "Kernel panic" and a notice about "killing the interrupt handler." After that, my Caps Lock and Num Lock LED's started to flash, and the system would not respond to anything except a cold-turkey shutdown.
Just tho show you how new I am at this game--and that some might say that Fedora Core was a poor choice for a total newcomer to Linux--I did not appreciate what a "kernel panic" was until you told me to proceed as I just did, and I read the above messages (as nearly as I can recall them).
All right--so the kernel flies into a panic and shuts down its interrupt handler every time I connect the card reader. I assume that the other machine does the same thing. So how do I get the kernel *not* to panic?
Temlakos
On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 08:35, James Wilkinson wrote:
What happens if you press Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get to a text terminal, then connect the card reader?
It throughly sounds as though you've got a kernel panic.
James.
This might be a silly question, but do you have the reader plugged into a USB 2.0 slot?
On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, Temlakos wrote:
I tried the below procedure.
At first it said something about not having something-or-other in place--I can't recall what, because when everything froze, I lost it all. I recall that it recognized the reader as a Lexar, but then kept saying that USB drivers were timing out. And then suddenly it poured out a lot of gibberish, ending in a string of hex codes that I can't possibly recall--ending with the phrase "Kernel panic" and a notice about "killing the interrupt handler." After that, my Caps Lock and Num Lock LED's started to flash, and the system would not respond to anything except a cold-turkey shutdown.
Just tho show you how new I am at this game--and that some might say that Fedora Core was a poor choice for a total newcomer to Linux--I did not appreciate what a "kernel panic" was until you told me to proceed as I just did, and I read the above messages (as nearly as I can recall them).
All right--so the kernel flies into a panic and shuts down its interrupt handler every time I connect the card reader. I assume that the other machine does the same thing. So how do I get the kernel *not* to panic?
Temlakos
On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 08:35, James Wilkinson wrote:
What happens if you press Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get to a text terminal, then connect the card reader?
It throughly sounds as though you've got a kernel panic.
James.
On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 12:02, Mike Burger wrote:
This might be a silly question, but do you have the reader plugged into a USB 2.0 slot?
I'm not sure that there would be a way to tell--but it might *not* be a USB 2.0 slot. The machine is a Microtel, nearly a year old, that I got without an operating system installed. I added a disk drive and installed Fedora Core 1.
Temlakos
On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 12:02, Mike Burger wrote:
This might be a silly question, but do you have the reader plugged into a USB 2.0 slot?
I don't think it is, actually. In my latest test the machine said *nothing* about this being USB 2.0. And this time, when the timeouts started, I pulled the plug on the device before any kernel panic set in. Then I logged in as root and initiated a controlled shutdown-with-reboot.
And before that happened, I got messages that correctly identified the reader as a Lexar, the medium as CF, and the size of the card as 128MB.
So is that the problem? I need to install FC into a brand-new machine that specifically has USB 2.0 so that the kernel will not panic?
Next question: Do I need a card reader designed for USB 1.1 and not 2.0? If so, I guess I'll mock up another search on eBay...
Temlakos
Temlakos has been having trouble with his card reader.
Slow down, breathe easily, you're not doing anything wrong (as far as I can tell).
At first it said something about not having something-or-other in place--I can't recall what, because when everything froze, I lost it all. I recall that it recognized the reader as a Lexar, but then kept saying that USB drivers were timing out. And then suddenly it poured out a lot of gibberish, ending in a string of hex codes that I can't possibly recall--ending with the phrase "Kernel panic" and a notice about "killing the interrupt handler." After that, my Caps Lock and Num Lock LED's started to flash, and the system would not respond to anything except a cold-turkey shutdown.
Just tho show you how new I am at this game--and that some might say that Fedora Core was a poor choice for a total newcomer to Linux--I did not appreciate what a "kernel panic" was until you told me to proceed as I just did, and I read the above messages (as nearly as I can recall them).
All right--so the kernel flies into a panic and shuts down its interrupt handler every time I connect the card reader. I assume that the other machine does the same thing. So how do I get the kernel *not* to panic?
You've got a kernel panic. Unix-like kernels Should Not Panic: you've run into a kernel bug. (That means that it probably would happen on any Linux).
The next question to ask is whether you've got Nvidia, ATi or VMware drivers installed that *didn't* come with Fedora. If so, there's not much that the Fedora or kernel communities can do to help you. All you can do is report a bug to whoever provided those drivers.
If you haven't been installing binary-only drivers, then the next thing to do is to enter a bug on bugzilla.fedora.us. They probably will want you to provide one of those crash dumps: it isn't gibberish to them.
You should find that Ctrl + Page Up and Ctrl + Page Down still work: these scroll back to let you see the rest of the text.
Do you have a digital camera? If so, I'd recommend taking photos of the kernel panic, and transcribing them at leisure. If not, I'd recommend an old-fashioned piece of techology known as a pencil and paper.
In your description, emphasise that it is reproducable.
In the meantime, I'm sorry, but there's not much you can do. It looks like your card reader is not compatible with Fedora Core 1.
You might have more luck with Fedora Core 2: a lot of work has been done in this area.
James.
On Sat, 2004-10-02 at 00:21, Temlakos wrote:
Next question: Do I need a card reader designed for USB 1.1 and not 2.0? If so, I guess I'll mock up another search on eBay...
No you don't. A USB 2.0 device will usually fall back to 1.x modes -- the designers of the spec are not _that_ naive... And even if it wouldn't fall back, there's no reason at all it should trigger a kernel panic!
As a first shot, can you pls connect the reader only without a medium in it? What's happening then?
Next, what reader do you have? And, is it mentioned here: http://www.linux-usb.org/ ?
Further, is the USB hardware on your motherboard officially supported by the kernel?
HaJo
On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 12:32, James Wilkinson wrote:
You've got a kernel panic. Unix-like kernels Should Not Panic: you've run into a kernel bug. (That means that it probably would happen on any Linux).
The next question to ask is whether you've got Nvidia, ATi or VMware drivers installed that *didn't* come with Fedora. If so, there's not much that the Fedora or kernel communities can do to help you. All you can do is report a bug to whoever provided those drivers.
No. I never installed any display driver or other binary driver that did not distribute with Fedora. I have found Fedora to be a fairly comprehensive distribution, so that I don't have to go so far afield.
If you haven't been installing binary-only drivers, then the next thing to do is to enter a bug on bugzilla.fedora.us. They probably will want you to provide one of those crash dumps: it isn't gibberish to them.
You should find that Ctrl + Page Up and Ctrl + Page Down still work: these scroll back to let you see the rest of the text.
Do you have a digital camera? If so, I'd recommend taking photos of the kernel panic, and transcribing them at leisure. If not, I'd recommend an old-fashioned piece of techology known as a pencil and paper.
In your description, emphasise that it is reproducable.
In the meantime, I'm sorry, but there's not much you can do. It looks like your card reader is not compatible with Fedora Core 1.
You might have more luck with Fedora Core 2: a lot of work has been done in this area.
Thanks for the advice.
Say--do you suppose that Fedora Core 3 will be able to mount it without a panic? I might just wait until then.
Temlakos
On Sat, 2004-10-02 at 00:50, Temlakos wrote:
In the meantime, I'm sorry, but there's not much you can do. It looks like your card reader is not compatible with Fedora Core 1.
You might have more luck with Fedora Core 2: a lot of work has been done in this area.
Thanks for the advice.
Say--do you suppose that Fedora Core 3 will be able to mount it without a panic? I might just wait until then.
Not too likely. I do a lot with ext USB devices, especially card readers, and I have found FC1 superior to FC2 on that matter.
On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 12:40, HaJo Schatz wrote:
As a first shot, can you pls connect the reader only without a medium in it? What's happening then?
What happens then is that it complains about not being able to read the partition table, and then starts timing out, and ultimately flies into the same full-blown panic.
Next, what reader do you have? And, is it mentioned here: http://www.linux-usb.org/ ?
It's a Lexar, but I don't think it's either of the ones they list. It can't be the JumpDrive 64MB--because it's designed to read cards that are much larger.
Further, is the USB hardware on your motherboard officially supported by the kernel?
Hard to tell. The earliest messages say, "USB device 2 is not supported by any driver." What might that mean?
Temlakos
Temlakos wrote:
On Fri, 2004-10-01 at 12:02, Mike Burger wrote:
This might be a silly question, but do you have the reader plugged into a USB 2.0 slot?
I don't think it is, actually. In my latest test the machine said *nothing* about this being USB 2.0. And this time, when the timeouts started, I pulled the plug on the device before any kernel panic set in. Then I logged in as root and initiated a controlled shutdown-with-reboot.
And before that happened, I got messages that correctly identified the reader as a Lexar, the medium as CF, and the size of the card as 128MB.
So is that the problem? I need to install FC into a brand-new machine that specifically has USB 2.0 so that the kernel will not panic?
Next question: Do I need a card reader designed for USB 1.1 and not 2.0?
It *shouldn't* matter; USB2 devices are supposed to be backwards compatible with USB1 hosts -- they'll just operate at USB1 speeds.
In practice, things might be different...
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HaJo Schatz -
James Wilkinson -
John Thompson -
Mike Burger -
Robert P. J. Day -
Temlakos