USB 3.0 support is patchy in OpenBSD 5.7

[betweendayandnight]

I've discovered on some occasions that OpenBSD 5.7-amd64 is unable to detect my USB 2.0 and 3.0 flash drive. The port into which the flash drive is plugged supports USB 3.0 natively.

Microsoft Windows OS (7 and 8), Ubuntu and Debian have no problem detecting the said flash drive.

Any clues as to the cause of the issue?

================================================== =

The following line has been added to /etc/fstab:

/dev/sd1i /mnt/usb msdos rw,noauto 0 0

I plug my USB 2.0 flash drive into a port that supports USB 3.0 natively and reboot my machine.

Next I type the following command:

sudo mount /dev/sd1i /mnt/usb

And the following error message appears:

mount_ffs: /dev/sd1i on /mnt/usb: Device not configured

Note that my USB 2.0 flash drive already contains some text files, programs, etc. and the latter are visible under Microsoft Windows OS, Ubuntu and Debian. I've the same problem with my non-empty USB 3.0 flash drive.

[jggimi]

Hi there. USB3 support is relatively new -- it was announced for OpenBSD 5.7 -- and development continues. There have been 5 additional revisions to the driver since 5.7-release, and there have been some problems reported with at least one model of USB controller.

If the flash drive will operate at USB 2.0 speeds, you could disable the USB3 driver, xhci(4), during boot and see if the problems are circumvented. Here's a quick "how to" but you should refer to FAQ 5.8 and FAQ 5.9 and the boot_config(8) and config(8) man pages.

1. At the boot> prompt, type "-c" to boot /bsd and enter its User Kernel Configuration tool
2. At the first UKC> prompt, type "disable xhci"
3. At the second UKC> prompt, type "q"
4. If after booting, problems are resolved, you can make the change permanent by applying the change with config(8) and its -u option.

The other alternative is to upgrade from -release to -current, the OpenBSD development branch, but that would not be a recommendation I would give to a brand new user. Flavors of OpenBSD are discussed in FAQ 5.1.

[jggimi]

Whoops, I missed your edits. The problem may not be USB 3 related.

When you insert the device, you should received kernel messages on the console (and repeated in /var/log/messages) that indicates the sd(4) device dynamically defined. Be sure it's sd1. If it is a different number, your commands and fstab entry will not function.

Second, if it is sd1, be sure the device's MBR has been read and the partition is FAT. If it's an NTFS or Ext4 file system, it isn't a FAT filesystem.

# fdisk sd1

Mountable foreign filesystems should be assigned a virtual disklabel partition. This is based on the partition type in the MBR partition table, not by inspection of the filesystem. We've had users here who had MBR partition types that belied the actual filesystem being used, causing difficulties.

# disklabel sd1