5.8 kernel currently has issues with Renesas USB controllers

Support Kernel
1

For the time being the 5.8 kernel has issues with Renesas USB controllers due to a FW version check issue. My PCIe x4 USB 3.0 controller card is affected by it. I need that controller working, as I currently have a USB HDD enclosure attached to it, that I need to use.

It’s currently being discussed here and the latest solution is to remove that check entirely because it turned out there are so many FW versions in the wild (FW version 8209 in my case). I’m currently trying to build a 5.8 kernel with the patch added using the latest PKGBUILD from GitLab (5.8.1-3 at present). However, as of yesterday I wasn’t able to compile a new kernel due to a patch ( 0001-nonupstream-navi10-vfio-reset.patch) cannot be correctly applied (and it does matter to me as I’m using a 5700 XT on that system). The current stable 5.8 kernel is 5.8.0, though.

So for the time being using the 5.8 kernel isn’t a good idea if your system has Renesas USB3 controllers. I have to stay on 5.7 for the moment until I could get a modified kernel built.

2 Likes
2

Thanks for the heads up… I have a USB3 Renesas PCIe card also so will avoid 5.8.x until this is resolved.

3

there is different modules for

lsmod | grep xhci_pci

xhci_pci               20480  0
xhci_pci_renesas       20480  1 xhci_pci ( appears in kernel 5.8 )
xhci_hcd              286720  1 xhci_pci
4

It seems the 5.8.2-1 PKGBUILD in the Manjaro GitLab is now buildable as the broken patch has been removed.

I grabbed the patch here and built the kernel. The Renesas USB controller is now working again. According to the kernel bugzilla, the said patch has been picked so it should be fixed eventually.

5

This is good news. Maybe the 5.8.4 kernel will work again.

6

Just installed the 5.8.3-2 kernel and my renesas USB 3 card works !!

Thank you Manjaro !!!

7

The vanilla PKGBUILD and kernel build as of 5.8.5-2 still does not work with my Renesas USB 3.0 controller which has a FW version of 8209.

It seems the patch that removes the FW version check is still required. It’s not going to be in the upstream anytime soon.

8

How would I know if I have or need them?

9

If lspci return something mentioning Renesas USB then yes, you’ll need it. Like this:

03:00.0 USB controller: Renesas Technology Corp. uPD720202 USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 02)

You can grep on the word Renesas to confirm it easier.

1 Like
10

Thanks. For me it says Intel, so I guess I’m off the hook.

11

The 5.8.6 kernel finally has the Renesas USB driver patch so it should now get loaded and initialized correctly

12

they remove check version
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/stable-queue.git/diff/releases/5.8.6/usb-renesas-xhci-remove-version-check.patch?id=9855a38d834ec085a0c6319f0bca6723aacd4ee8

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Can confirm it’s fixed now. The computer having the issue can now properly access the Renesas USB controller after updating the kernel to 5.8.6 yestarday.