Misinterpretation of Standard Causing USB Disconnects On Resume In Linux

hypnosec writes "According to a new revelation by Sarah Sharp, misinterpretation of the USB 2.0 standard may have been the culprit behind USB disconnects on resume in Linux all along rather than cheap and buggy devices. According to Sharp the USB core is to blame for the disconnections rather than the devices themselves as the core doesn't wait long enough for the devices to transition from a 'resume state to U0.' The USB 2.0 standard states that system software that handles USB must provide for 10ms resume recovery time (TRSMRCY) during which it shouldn't attempt a connection to the device connected to that particular bus segment."

Comments

A bug in Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly the whole thing is broken, and we should transition to a newer, more open and transparent system than even open source.

I will call it OPENER Source. You aren't just able to read the source, you're required to read it!

Re:A bug in Linux?

[marcello_dl]

> I will call it OPENER Source.
I will call it FREER Software. And please do not call that kernel "Linux", call it "GNU/Linux's kernel".

Jokes aside, now that there is an Android/Linux "that can't boot to the home screen on its flagship device for lack of GPU support", I suggest using GNU/Linux to refer to the truly free stack :)

Re:A bug in Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

You aren't just able to read the source, you're required to read it!

In fact, you are only allowed to read the source! Compiling it is not permitted, you must read and interpret the code yourself. Yes, it may be somewhat slower than using one of those new-fangled 'electronic' computers to read the code for you, but it's the only way to guarantee code freedom!

Re:A bug in Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

You aren't just able to read the source, you're required to read it!

Yes. All source shall be printed in Captcha-esque franken-text which must be fat-fingered into an interpreter in order to accomplish anything.

Re:A bug in Linux?

[shentino]

FNORD

Update

[Anonymous Coward]

"Update: Looks like this is an xHCI specific issue, and probably not the cause of the USB device disconnects under EHCI. "

Re:Update

[Andy Dodd]

Hmm... I wonder what the HSIC interface on Samsung Exynos4 is.

HSIC is a stripped-down form of USB that's frequently used as the interface for onboard modems on mobile phones. Samsung Exynos4 devices have been plagued by frequent HSIC disconnects for nearly a year.

At the software level, HSIC uses one of the existing HCI interfaces - the main differences between HSIC and USB are physical layer things, not software.

Re:Update

[Anonymous Coward]

Which means there's disconnects due to xHCI and then there's just crappy hardware causing them as well...perfect...

Re:Update

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never run across that bug on my Linux box, but it's probably because it never sleeps or hibernates. Sometimes I shut it off, which is something I never do with my Windows notebook. Booting Windows is a PITA, having to enter the password and reopen all my apps and figure out where I was when I closed them. The Linux box I just push the button and a minute later all my apps are just as they were before shutting down.

If Windows had this bug it would be a lot more troublesome.

Re:Update

[Immerman]

Hey, you wouldn't want a common cause for all your seemingly common problems would you? Where's the fun in debugging that?

linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could have fooled me, I end up spending upwards of 3 months a year fixing bugs in the base os that we ship to run our appliance on. Some of the linux subsystems still read like they were written in someone's basement even after a decade of most of the maintainers being paid a yearly salary to maintain it. God forbid you actually fix some of the crap and post fixes though that are more than ten lines long.. Its a fine way to get blacklisted.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't want the OS to be correct, they want all the f'ed up applications to work no matter how f'ed up they are.

Re:linux has bugs?

[TheGavster]

It's true. Linus has been quite vocal about whose fault it is when a kernel change breaks an application...

Re:linux has bugs?

[LordLimecat]

Im not a software dev, but I have never agreed with this:

If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs.

What happens when some program has been using a privilege escalation bug to get around sudo, and it breaks when the kernel is patched to fix the vulnerability? Is that still "a kernel bug", should they not patch it? It seems to me that, yes, you try not to break applications, but this is why you have an official, supported API, and if bad developers want to rely on buggy kernel behavior for their programs, you have to choose between either screwing them, or screwing everyone else.

If anyone can enlighten me as to why thats wrong, Id appreciate it.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

For all practical purposes there's no way, I repeat, no way to "heat the whole apartment block" to eradicate bed bugs.

So you don't know what you are talking about.

If anyone can enlighten me as to why thats wrong, Id appreciate it.

1. syscall returns -EFOO when to report condition A
2. hmm, someone notices that -EFOO is too generic. That syscall should return the more specific -ECOND_A_ERROR instead. They change it.
3. ALL SOFTWARE suddenly works *different* and perhaps does not work at all on the modified kernel that uses that syscall vs.older kernel.

Kapish??

Do not change API internals. Fixing undocumented features (ie. bugs, like overflows) is one thing. Modifying documented and established API on a whim is a bad bad bad thing.

If you want to modify it like that, you do the following,

1. syscall returns -EFOO when to report condition A
2. hmm, someone notices that -EFOO is too generic. That syscall should return the more specific -ECOND_A_ERROR instead. SO MAKE A NEW SYSCALL THAT RETURNS CORRECT! Leave old one as deprecated for removal in some years.
3. ALL SOFTWARE continues to work.

If #2 is too much effort for reward, then do nothing. But above all, do not break userland with kernel changes. Ever.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Osgeld]

shh, its talk like that gets you downmodded to hell a week after the fact by the fanboi's who think icewasel + linux + libre office is all the universe needs

Re:linux has bugs?

[hedwards]

Basically, the kernel has an Application Binary Interface which is a bit like a contract. If the application gives the kernel something formatted in a specific way, the kernal promises to give it back something in a specific way and the other way around. Any software that is written to respect the contract should never be broken by a change to the kernel as the application has no knowledge of how the kernel performs its obligation.

Changes to the ABI are not supposed to be common events. They're supposed to be changed only when lesser changes can't work. FreeBSD handles it using compatibility libraries which maintain the ABI for various kernel revisions so that applications can continue to use older ones if need be. AFAIK, Linux doesn't do that, and as a result, the kernel maintainer and the developers writing the code have to be even more careful about changes made not messing up the ABI.

Also, because Linux is just a kernel without a userland, a change to the Linux kernel that was permitted to break the ABI could hose all of the distros all at once requiring the rewrite of hundreds of little bits of software that are cobbled together to make the distros function as complete OSes.

There's more to it, but that's basically why Linus takes the stance that the kernel is to blame and not the developer. But, he undoubtedly doesn't consider it to be the kernel's fault if a developer does things that don't comply with the normal ABI specifications.

Re:linux has bugs?

[You're All Wrong]

Strange. I'll admit that Linux has some drivers that are full of bugs, but the ones that are most full of bugs seem to be ones thrown over the wall by large hardware vendors. You know the ones - the drivers with 20000-line C files, that create 2000 checkpatch warnings. Those drivers were written by salaried employees, not sitting in their basement.

Re:linux has bugs?

[You're All Wrong]

And Alan Cox resigned as maintainer of the TTY subsystem because of this attitude. (Userspace was clearly broken, and a kernel change made this clear, however, in Linus' eyes, that was "breaking userspace") Just because Linus holds that opinion doesn't mean that it's universally shared to the same extent (everyone agrees to some extent, but not to absolutes).

Re:linux has bugs?

[KGIII]

Define "some years?" What if the application developer doesn't change the behavior after those some years have passed? Isn't ensuring backwards compatibility one of the reasons that Windows has had so many security issues? If so then do you really want to have to be constantly on the lookout for those same issues in the Linux kernel? Finally, why does Linus insist on acting like a child?

I don't suppose you'll truly know the answer to the last question but I'd appreciate any speculation. Keep in mind that, well, I'm actually quite a fan of Linux (I prefer Mandriva though I'm not opposed to Ubuntu - both seem to be somewhere near my skill level though they've "dumbed down" Ubuntu a bit it seems or I've just acclimated to it) and though I have nothing invested (other than personal interest) it seems as if he's a petulant child at times. Okay, quite frequently... That's sad because having someone approachable would probably be a good thing for Linux. As for approachability, you have RMS and Linus... Yeah...

It's a shame really because I think that we truly could have had a year of Linux on the Destkop® by now if it weren't for the behavior of some of the most vocal and closely associated people. And no, it wouldn't have ever really have been that year but it likely would have been a lot closer and a lot more popular. The goal is to encourage people to be free or at least examine their options, yes?

Re:linux has bugs?

[KGIII]

Basically, the kernel has an Application Binary Interface which is a bit like a contract. If the application gives the kernel something formatted in a specific way, the kernal promises to give it back something in a specific way and the other way around. Any software that is written to respect the contract should never be broken by a change to the kernel as the application has no knowledge of how the kernel performs its obligation.

That was a very good explanation and describes it in a manner that I've never seen before but it does describe it very well. So, in short, thank you for that. Even if I had mod points I'd rather just thank you for having taken the time to come up with that description (I spent 'em already, they'll probably give me more tomorrow) because, frankly, that's the best description I've seen of an ABI and how it probably *should* be done. It brings to mind some security questions (example: What do you do, from the kernel developer standpoint, if it turns out that the ABI has a security flaw in it - say it's an older ABI that is seldom used or the likes?) but I think those questions can wait for a better time and place.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Vhann]

What if the application developer doesn't change the behavior after those some years have passed?

Then the application gives a "clean break" at compile-time or segfaults if not recompiled. This happens all the time (“if not maintained, software rots”), use maintained applications or don't update your kernel.

Isn't ensuring backwards compatibility one of the reasons that Windows has had so many security issues? If so then do you really want to have to be constantly on the lookout for those same issues in the Linux kernel?

Security bugs are most likely handled differently, I do not know.

Finally, why does Linus insist on acting like a child?

That's your opinion. When you actually understand what he talks about, you may understand why he “acts like a child” (I'm not exactly sure what that means anyway). I'm guessing Linus is pretty good at what he does considering how nobody decided to fork yet.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of the linux subsystems still read like they were written in someone's basement even after a decade of most of the maintainers being paid a yearly salary to maintain it.

What makes you believe that those people paid a yearly salary have moved out of their basements?

I mean, Ulrich Drepper is a rather infamous basement dweller, and he was on RedHat payroll for years.

Re:linux has bugs?

[minus9]

Yet you still choose it as the base OS to run your appliance on. Presumably it's still better than any of the alternatives.

All software has bugs. I'm sure plenty of device drivers written in brightly lit offices by people with smart haircuts and shiny shoes have some absolutely horrific code too. I doubt which floor you work on has any significant effect.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet you still choose it as the base OS to run your appliance on. Presumably it's still better than any of the alternatives.

All software has bugs. I'm sure plenty of device drivers written in brightly lit offices by people with smart haircuts and shiny shoes have some absolutely horrific code too. I doubt which floor you work on has any significant effect.

Yes, but more often than not, the guy with M.Sc. in Software Engineering cranks out much more professional stuff than some self-taught basement hacker.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Somehow I doubt you really capische italian

Re:linux has bugs?

[somersault]

it seems as if [Linus is] a petulant child at times. Okay, quite frequently... That's sad because having someone approachable would probably be a good thing for Linux. As for approachability, you have RMS and Linus... Yeah...

As opposed to Ballmer throwing his chairs about? In case you haven't noticed, the people that run all the world's largest companies are even bigger assholes than Linus. Besides, to me Linus just seems opinionated, rather than immature.. and having a strong sense of direction helps when doing something like overseeing the Linux kernel.

Re:linux has bugs?

[N1AK]

Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP!

Sounds exactly like a petulant child to me.

Re:linux has bugs?

[KGIII]

The two being similar isn't really the measuring stick you want to use, is it?

Re:linux has bugs?

[KGIII]

Thank you for the information and, well, your view that his career choice means that he behaves like an immature child is a rather absurd argument really. The rest makes sense but your last statement doesn't really.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Forever Wondering]

The ABI has been changed upon occasion. If a struct passed to a syscall (or ioctl) has some spare option bits (that were reserved [and therefore zero], that can be the way to go (e.g. turning on the bit indicates that the program is aware of the new semantics).

Otherwise, a new syscall (or ioctl) number is assigned. For example, the stat syscall originally had a syscall number of 18. When the "struct stat" was modified [added some new fields and/or expanded the size of others], the syscall number was bumped to 106. Old programs that were not recompiled issued stat with 18 and worked unchanged. If you recompiled, you got syscall 106 and the new semantics.

Re:linux has bugs?

[higuita]

of course this is related to the standard API, user level should not use internal kernel API... those can and will break sooner or later.
But if a program works and isnt doing something totally stupid in a old kernel, new versions of kernel may not break it. Even if there is a need to a API change, its better to create a new interface so newer programs can use it, but old programs can still use the old API, at least until it's deprecated and later removed (usually taking years to happen)

Re:linux has bugs?

[VortexCortex]

I'm sure plenty of device drivers written in brightly lit offices by people with smart haircuts and shiny shoes have some absolutely horrific code too.

Indeed.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, at least for Linux we have the answers for your questions!

When there are few users of an extremely seriously broken ABI (e.g. creates a security hole that cannot be otherwise fixed), the ABI is changed and userspace has to update. This is rare, and it took a large while (about 5-10 years) for Linus to actually accept that, but it is now a fact. An example is the mapping of very low addresses (the first 4k-64k) to real memory instead of causing a page fault, which allowed anyone to trivially exploit null-pointer bugs even on ring 0. This is now impossible, and that change broke a few applications. Another is the new hardlink and softlink behavious for stick directories, which is much safer but did cause some breakage.

When there are just too many users or the breakage is not that severe in the first place (e.g. it causes a problem only for the application that uses it, and not a kernel exploit), a new ABI is provided, and the old one deprecated (to be deleted in a few years, if ever), there are a really large number of syscalls in this situation.

When the users of the ABI are in a "special class", the stable ABI rules are only loosely applied, and they must be be kept reasonably up-to-date and that is it. udev comes to mind. There are _very few_ applications on this class.

If the broken application is a proprietary application _AND_ it was misusing things very badly in the first place, the user is told it was his fault for buying crap and to find a way to get it fixed himself. This is extremely rare, you'll be extremely hard pressed to find any cases over 20 years of Linux.

Re:linux has bugs?

[VortexCortex]

I dunno about that. This self taught basement hacker has been writing self documenting code since single digit years... In octal. However, there are some who write gobs of horrid code with sparse comments like // here be dragons.

Like the basement hacker, there's a variety of quality in the fresh out of college folks with purely academic backgrounds. Each kinds can suffer culture shock when you have to adapt to a project or workforce. Ancedotally I've seen more balking from the college certificate carrying programmer than the equally learned self taught hacker. The truth is it's only dedication to correct and well tested code that matters when you're looking at what produces correct and well tested code. That shit isn't rocket science, man.

Re:linux has bugs?

[somersault]

Well, maybe Mauro really needed to STFU and listen to someone more experienced at that point? There's a stage where it's better to stop trying to be polite, and get people to wake up, if you want them to learn.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't ensuring backwards compatibility one of the reasons that Windows has had so many security issues?

The problem in Windows is that the first versions targeted at users basically had no security at all (which at the time was still not that bad, as computers were not usually connected to a world wide network, most were not even connected to LANs, and allmost all of them were used either by a single person or by a group of people trusting each other; the server line was separate and certainly had a better security model). Maintaining compatibility with an insecure operating system is very likely to introduce security issues.

Linux on the other hand was designed as secure system from the start (because it was written as POSIX system, and POSIX was meant to be used also on servers). Therefore maintaining compatibility should be possible without introducing security issues.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

And maybe some MS employee really needed to have a chair thrown at him. See how that works?

Re:linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're just upset because nobody pays the Linux trolls, they troll to scratch an itch.

Re:linux has bugs?

[somersault]

The chair wasn't thrown at anyone in particular. It was thrown because someone else was leaving MS to work at Google and Ballmer decided he was going to "fucking kill Google". He's doing an A1 job so far.

Re:linux has bugs?

[RabidReindeer]

Some of the linux subsystems still read like they were written in someone's basement even after a decade of most of the maintainers being paid a yearly salary to maintain it.

So in other words, right on par with commercial product code.

Re:linux has bugs?

[dbIII]

What happens when some program has been using a privilege escalation bug to get around sudo

Then the kernel guys and everyone else that is handy can pitch in to fix sudo if they want but that could be a bit hard for them since sudo has nothing at all to do with the kernel.
If you put as much effort into learning about the thing you are attempting to make fun of instead of the effort you expend in stirring shit then you would be an expert instead of coming off as a clueless clown.

Re:linux has bugs?

[YttriumOxide]

there are some who write gobs of horrid code with sparse comments like // here be dragons.

What really gets to me is when I deal with code that is 70% comments, but it's all along the lines of:

/* The following function increments i and then calls the other function when it matches x */
IncrementAndCheckI() {
i++; /* increments i */
if(i==x) { /* checks if i is now the same as x */
CallOtherFunc(i); /* call the other function with i as a parameter */
}
}

What's most disturbing is that I see this really quite regularly. Damn near every line is commented, and yet none of it tells me ANYTHING useful about what the code is supposed to be doing or why.

I see this FAR more often from university educated programmers than I do from self-taught hackers.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or an exasperated parent forbidden by law to take other measures. And if you had quoted the entire message rather than your selected line, it would have been pretty clear where the frustration came from.

Maybe it's different among Americans, but liars and bullshitters are not well tolerated in the Nordic countries. Linus is a Finn after all, and those are particularly not known for their patience with bullshit.

From your selective quoting I can only conclude that you are one of those lying bullshitters, and what Linus said and did in this case was completely correct.

Re:linux has bugs?

[knarf]

Oh yes, oodles of 'm. We find 'm, we fix 'm. You can use those fixes for free, nearly no strings attached.

If Linux does not work for you I'd just go and pay someone for something that does work if I were you. Just don't come complaining about the bugs which are not fixed or those which are fixed but force you to buy a newer version. Don't complain about missing hardware support.

BTW, I don't understand what you mean by 'getting blacklisted for posting fixes which are more than ten lines long'. While the discourse on LKML can be somewhat rough I don't recognise your description as fitting.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, he chose GNU as the base OS to run his appliance on. Just sayin'.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

This self taught basement hacker has been writing self documenting code since single digit years... In octal.

Wow, you're programming since 2000 years?

Oh, you mean the years 200x. Get off my lawn!

Re:linux has bugs?

[jellomizer]

No no you missed the point of Open Source.
If they are bugs you blame the the reporter, not the code.

While some open source projects have paid employees offering source. For the most part it is still voluntary, that means there are mixed motives.

So when you report a bug, the developer may get hostile, because you are stomping on his ego. Giving yourself an Ego boost is one reason why people contribute to OSS projects.

Re:linux has bugs?

[jellomizer]

That is the point of Major Version releases vs minor version releases.

Minor version changes shouldn't expect any software compatibility breaks. Major version you may expect some.

Re:linux has bugs?

[smooth wombat]

I hate to admit it, since I don't use any form of Linux, but I'm beginning to like Linus despite his ego. His words are similar to the ones I would like to tell the multi-billion dollar corporations I have to deal with when I'm trying to figure out why their software works on everyone's machine one day, then on only one the next.

It's quite obviously a programming issue but no, I have to go round and round with people at various levels until they finally admit defeat and say, "Make the user a local admin." As if that solves the underlying problem.

When you hear me get on programmers cases in articles on here, this is why.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Mr. Slippery]

This self taught basement hacker has been writing self documenting code since single digit years...

Anyone who believes in "self documenting code" does not understand computer programming.

Re:linux has bugs?

[petermgreen]

I think there are a couple of things that contribute to that

1: example programs in textbooks/lecture slides are very often commented in the style you show. This is done because those programs have to be understandable to people who are just starting to learn the language but it also means students may come to think that comments like this should be in regular code.
2: teachers order their students to comment code but either they don't bother to teach their students about good commenting or their students don't "get it" when they are taught.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Megane]

Leave old one as deprecated for removal in some years.

...and this is how we get shit like PHP's "mysql_real_escape_string"?

(never mind that in that particular case the whole premise is wrong and you should really be using prepared statements instead of inserting parameters into SQL command strings like a 5-year old with scissors and glue)

Re:linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

He never said he was using GNU, only that the kernel was Linux. For all we know, it could be Android or some other embedded system, or even a BSD-based userland.

Re:linux has bugs?

[noh8rz10]

he's obv an egomaniac. the steve jobs of open source. the problem is that jobs's egomania spurred a company to do great things and climb to the top of the computing world in terms of profit and quality and innovation (i think this is an observation, not a judgment), while linus's egomania has held back his product. can he be replaced? does linus have a tim cook?

Re:linux has bugs?

[LordLimecat]

So you don't know what you are talking about.

No, it means I have some idea, but Im not an expert. I have been an IT guy for close to a decade, I understand avoiding breakage, but I also understand that breakage is an expected reality when you upgrade. This is why you dont log into a random linux box and do apt-get upgrade; you can expect that upgrading java or perl or python or anything else has a decent chance of breaking something, even when it shouldnt. We're not even at the stage where Linus' dream is a reality: upgrading your kernel is one of the SUREST ways to break stuff-- at least it has been in the past.

Basically, I dont have the dev perspective, but I do have the end-user and the IT perspectives down pretty good.

Do not change API internals.... SO MAKE A NEW SYSCALL THAT RETURNS CORRECT!

If Linus had said that, I would have been on board, hence my "supported API" comment. But he didnt-- he said if a change you make to the kernel breaks any user application, ever, it is a kernel bug-- and I find that to be absurd for the reasons I mentioned.

In this particular case (which I recall reading about when it happened), Linus was right to chew the guy out. Im not disputing that. Its the statement he made (quoted above) that I never understood.

But above all, do not break userland with kernel changes. Ever.

So in the Windows XP-every-dev-is-assuming-administrator-rights scenario, where devs are being retards and requiring rights they dont need or failing to actually check for their needed rights, how do you proceed? Say "screw security, we're stuck with this forever"? What about in that "app relies on security hole" problem (which has definately been an issue with eg Java JRE before)? Just leave it unpatched for the sake of this golden rule?

Re:linux has bugs?

[LordLimecat]

Security bugs are most likely handled differently, I do not know.

No. Thats the other part of Linus' attitude which I find ridiculous-- he has repeatedly stated that "security bugs are just bugs-- we dont treat them specially".

Combine that with the statement I quoted above, and you begin to see why I find his attitude absurd.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

This varies by institution. In every class starting from Intro to Programming at the low-ranked public university I went to, points were deducted for sparse OR spurious comments, since useless comments are worse than no comments at all.

Re:linux has bugs?

[LordLimecat]

Minor version changes shouldn't expect any software compatibility breaks.

Except that every sysadmin, ever, expects compatibility breakage on ANY kernel upgrade.

Re:linux has bugs?

[LordLimecat]

Would Linus' statement that I quoted be best understood to refer just to the ABI / API? Because my issue with it is that it seems to be far more broad.

Re:linux has bugs?

[LordLimecat]

Then the kernel guys and everyone else that is handy can pitch in to fix sudo if they want but that could be a bit hard for them since sudo has nothing at all to do with the kernel.If you put as much effort into learning about the thing you are attempting to make fun of

I understood it perfectly. If there is a privilege escalation bug in the kernel, a program may use that to avoid having to call sudo. That is something that would be patched at the kernel level, as that is where privilege escalation bugs tend to reside.

Re:linux has bugs?

[ultranova]

Finally, why does Linus insist on acting like a child?

I don't suppose you'll truly know the answer to the last question but I'd appreciate any speculation.

I'd imagine it's the classic "drunk on power" -syndrome: People are supported by their own internal structure and the social pressure around them. Having power removes some of that pressure, and some people are too weak to maintain their shape without it, so the part of their mind responsible for dealing with other people degenerates.

Basically, being able to be rude without consequences is every teenager's wet dream, and some people never advance beyond that.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Above]

This is why many appliance makers choose Free/Net/OpenBSD as their base OS of choice, along with their more permissive licenses.

While my firm does not ship an appliance, I honestly can't imagine making the choice to use Linux for one if we did, given the other options out there.

Re:linux has bugs?

[bill_mcgonigle]

I see this FAR more often from university educated programmers than I do from self-taught hackers.

Be careful of Sturgeon's Law colliding with confirmation bias.

Re:linux has bugs?

[BitZtream]

Uhm, you're taking ONE snippet of a much longer diatribe and you're doing it out of context.

At no point has Linus believed that a kernel change can not break user applications. Its the TYPE of change that matters.

No, he is not OK with a API change for some stupid reason breaking shit ... unless the API was broken and that was the problem.

Your attitude shows that if you are capable of writing code, you're an amateur and don't really know anything about proper development practices.

Re:linux has bugs?

[iserlohn]

I'm not sure which world you live in, but leading the project which produces the OS kernel that is used in more computing devices than any other - well, that's not a bad result really.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

That bugs you? I routinely reject code check-ins that don't have every member, param, and return type documented. All public members must also include a sample code block as well in the documentation flower box above the method signature.

70% documentation is around the sweet spot for my developers and it will remain that way as long as I run the group.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say he's doing pretty good job compared to you. You've been talking nonsense since your apparition in this thread.

Re:linux has bugs?

[YttriumOxide]

That bugs you? I routinely reject code check-ins that don't have every member, param, and return type documented. All public members must also include a sample code block as well in the documentation flower box above the method signature.

70% documentation is around the sweet spot for my developers and it will remain that way as long as I run the group.

While 70% sounds a little on the high side to me, I can accept that and generally agree. The problem is when the code comments don't actually document/explain anything, as in my example. A comment that literally says, "increments i" for the line i++; brings no value whatsoever and only serves to get in the way of me reading and trying to understand it. If it said something like, "increment the counter" I'd be much happier (although I'd still probably consider it excessive if it was a blatantly obvious counter in a loop or so)

Re:linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha! as the original AC of this thread, I find it funny you brought up Drepper, one of my favorite open source guys.. I didn't know he lived in a basement, your link doesn't seem to actually indicate that fact.

I got into it with him even before the gethostbyname issue you site. I much prefer the Linus, screw you idiot, come to me with a better idea stance, than the Drepper I don't care if its right or wrong this is the way its going to be even though its obviously broken stance.

PS, my few interactions with Linus have been positive, not so with may of the subsystem maintainers who at this point seem to be playing turf wars rather than actually trying to improve the project.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet you still choose it as the base OS to run your appliance on. Presumably it's still better than any of the alternatives.

Wrong. Because it's free. Period.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone who doesn't believe in "self documenting code" has never worked in a production environment.

Write code that is clear and easy to read *without* comments. Then add comments as appropriate.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Maybe it's different among Americans, but liars and bullshitters are not well tolerated in the Nordic countries"

In the US it depends. This is very much a generalization, but in the US blue-collar, working class people tend to have no patience with bullshitters and liars - while white collar, college educated people tend to expect to be bullshitted and will even get offended or think less of someone who doesnt bullshit but is straight out honest. To the last group, its more about "feelings".

This is why (in part) you see so many posts from Americans who say ridiculous shit like "I agree with Linus's sentiment but not how he said it"...because to a college educated American, using foul language is an indication of, well, someone who isnt college educated and therefore supposedly inferior.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Zan Lynx]

I assume you would like security bugs specially marked so that you can prioritize fixing them and releasing the changes.

Look at the number of bugs found and fixed which have much later been discovered to be security bugs.

So now you didn't push "non-security" bug fixes to your production servers and they get owned by bad guys.

The lesson is that you should treat all bugs as security bugs.

Re:linux has bugs?

[Anonymous Coward]

He probably complains that he spends weeks getting the piss stains out of furniture he found at the side of the road for free, too.

Re:linux has bugs?

[webnut77]

Giving yourself an Ego boost is one reason why people contribute to OSS projects.

Maybe.
On the other hand, I've benefited so much from open source software that on the rare occasion that I can help, I'm delighted I can 'give' back.

Re:linux has bugs?

[suutar]

You hope. I bet some were "written" by low-paid contractors who just ported windows driver code.

Re:linux has bugs?

[dbIII]

You don't understand at all. Something has to be quite privileged just to talk to the kernel.

Re:linux has bugs?

[shentino]

Some things are supposed to fail, just like others are supposed to succeed.

If you break because you're relying on undefined behavior, then you have voided the warranty.

not surprising

[angryargus]

Power Management has worked well on Windows for 15+ years. I'm still waiting for Linux's first year, so problem on Linux are with the kernel and/or the drivers.

Re:not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

You just said power management worked well on windows 98 and 95.

I am calling you a liar.

Re:not surprising

[TheGavster]

15+ years is a stretch. Even in the 2006-07 era at the end of XP's development, there were brand new machines that couldn't return from sleep correctly. It was particularly vexing since a lot of them were laptops factory configured to sleep when left unattended. I will say that I haven't had any complaints with S3 sleep since the advent of Windows 7, however.

Re:not surprising

[Qzukk]

Spoken like someone who's never had to reboot a computer from coma mode.

Re: not surprising

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Power management ?

It's worked well for years on Linux. Only problems I ever had were involving nVidia workaround drivers and sleep.

Re:not surprising

[DG]

I've got an XP laptop that instantly BSODs the second you close the lid.

So yeah, myth busted.

DG

Re:not surprising

[jamesh]

My Windows 7 laptop will regularly not come out of sleep, requiring a battery removal to resolve. This occurs more often when I'm packing up and unplug something while it's going to sleep. Typically this happens after about 3 weeks since last reboot, which really sucks because it only has to get to a month and it gets rebooted to install updates anyway.

The other annoying thing it does is when it wakes up it still thinks it has the external monitor attached (the VGA/DVI monitor only - the USB attached ones are fine). To resolve this when i've changed location and have another second screen I have to unplug it, wait a few seconds, then plug it back in again. Worse when I'm somewhere where I don't have a second screen at all and I have to muck around to get Windows to understand I only have the laptop screen

Now it's probably true that the above issues are caused by third party drivers, and not Windows itself, but it still sucks.

Re:not surprising

[Stewie241]

Have a couple of Acer laptops running Windows 7 with displays that frequently (always?) don't come up out of sleep. The solution is to close the laptop and open it again, but this is obviously quite a pain. Linux actually performs better in this regard on the one. THe other one is my wife's so it isn't running Linux.

Re:not surprising

[philip.paradis]

THe other one is my wife's so it isn't running Linux.

My wife's laptop is running Debian 7. What's up with your wife? :)

Re:not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

> My wife's laptop is running Debian 7. What's up with your wife? :)

Yo, Ian!

Re:not surprising

[AlreadyStarted]

THe other one is my wife's so it isn't running Linux.

My wife's laptop is running Debian 7. What's up with your wife? :)

My guess is his is not imaginary.

Re: not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

he just means better than linux. they're trying to add crap to the kernel all the time. you want them to fix stuff too? soon linux will be just as bloated as nt and still doesn't work right
w8 actually works, but you cli freaks are freaky.
learn to program.

Re:not surprising

[angryargus]

There's a big difference between Windows where problems are a corner case, vs. Linux where success is a corner case. But the point still remains that I've used sleep and hibernate on most of my Windows machines without really fearing problems or data loss (I'll still save any progress before initiating it, though thanks to Office 97 I'm in the habit of saving regularly regardless), but I can't think of even bothering to try such a thing on Linux (nor can even of the people I know who love Linux enough to actually enjoy updating to a new distro every few months/years). I probably won't even think of trying to use sleep or hibernate on a Linux box until I see that the Linux kernel has developed drivers models that have some hint of being designed with power management in mind. Heck even the PCI driver model in Linux doesn't fit the spec well. Most Linux drivers I've had to deal with need to mess with the device's PCI configuration space themselves, whereas on Windows that's pretty rare because it's usually handled by the core kernel (which was the intent of the PCI spec based on how it's written).

Re: not surprising

[hedwards]

Which is easy for MS to achieve as they're willing to implement a non-standard ACPI implementation rather than using the Intel implementation that everybody else uses. And write work arounds for buggy implementations rather than kick it back to the manufacturer to do correctly.

Linux doesn't have that luxury, which means that DSDT changes and such have to be done by the end user rather than the developer that should have implemented the standard correctly in the first place.

Re:not surprising

[philip.paradis]

Oh heavens, it must be happening again. I'm obviously experiencing a relapse of those terrible hallucinations that have plagued me for years. Oddly enough, they seem to be at their worst when I'm at home. I've had visions of a beautiful woman in my house, with two beautiful little girls running around as well. I know, I should seek medical attention immediately, as this could be a sign of a serious condition. Speaking of conditions, my sense of reality is so distorted that I've come to believe my fictitious wife is pregnant with our third child! I've obviously taken a head first dive off the deep end.

Oh, wait, she's real after all. There she is, sitting on my couch, with her laptop running Debian 7, eating the steak I just cooked, wearing a shirt from my employer, grimacing at the thought of me putting this on Facebook. I guess I only stretched the truth a tad by putting it on /. instead.

Re:not surprising

[davester666]

You flipped the switch or hit the power button, it turned on, flip/hit it again, it went off. What didn't work right?

Re:not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

You motherfucker

Re:not surprising

[KGIII]

Wait... I thought you said she was beautiful? ;)

I'm just screwing with you - she's a wonderful looking woman and has good taste in operating systems as well assuming she uses it because she likes to and not because it pleases you. Then again, doing it for the latter reason isn't horrific or anything but I'm an idealist I guess. (Which is why I no longer have a wife.)

Re:not surprising

[Barsteward]

i've got a laptop that blue screens when you pull out the power cord.

If i remember correctly a lot of the power management problems are due to the manufacturers not implementing the standards correctly, they implemented them to the broken Windows implementation in order to keep WIndows working.

Re:not surprising

[Vhann]

Have a look at what your typical DSDT looks like and you may get an idea why shit doesn't work well (well, not always).

Basically, the DSDT is a table which the BIOS passes to the system to tell it what the ACPI is on the current machine. One of the "nice features" of the DSDT is its use of conditionals which look something like this (in BASH-like pseudo-code):

if [ _OS = "Windows XP Pro" ]; then /*Define the DSDT for Win XP here*/
else if [ _OS = "Windows 98" ]; then /*define the DSDT for Win98 here*/
else /*Well, we don't support you, so you are on your own*/
fi

One of the ways Linux-acpi tried to get this to work was to define _OS as "Windows XP Pro", but IIRC that didn't work because some vendors provide really broken DSDT who enable certain things under Win98 but disable it under Win XP (and conversely). In short, it is a mess.
So, at some point the way to get things to work was to extract the DSDT, modify it to pass Intel's compiler checks and once everything was sane, override the system one with this correct one via a bootloader option. This approach was eventually abandoned and the current approach is to try to get things to work "out-of-the-box". How that can be pulled off in these conditions is beyond me.

I do not know how to explain why the fact that the company that dev'ed the hardware developing the Windows drivers means it works there but nowhere else.

Re:not surprising

[philip.paradis]

Yeah, she's a nerd, and she actually likes Debian :).

Re: not surprising

[FireFury03]

FWIW, I now have a policy of avoiding Acer like the plague and advising my customers to do the same, owing to their appealing customer support when advised that an entire product line had a bios bug.

http://www.nexusuk.org/~steve/acer.xhtml

TL;DR: one of their lines of laptops has a dsdt bug, I informed them, they weren't interested. I even sent them a patch, still not interested (and decided that completely ignoring my emails was the best approach). To this date they haven't released an updated bios.

Re: not surprising

[FireFury03]

FWIW, I now have a policy of avoiding Acer like the plague and advising my customers to do the same, owing to their appealing customer support when advised that an entire product line had a bios bug.

http://www.nexusuk.org/~steve/acer.xhtml

TL;DR: one of their lines of laptops has a dsdt bug, I informed them, they weren't interested. I even sent them a patch, still not interested (and decided that completely ignoring my emails was the best approach). To this date they haven't released an updated bios.

Re:not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

You flipped the switch or hit the power button, it turned on, flip/hit it again, it went off. What didn't work right?

Power Management means putting harddrives to sleep when they haven't been used for 15 minutes. Turning off the monitor when the input is idle for 15 minutes. Turning off USB devices that haven't been accessed and are not open for pending interrupts by a user program for 1 minute. Reducing the speed of the PCI-E bus to the video card when the bus bandwidth has been far below capacity for 30 seconds. Reducing the CPU performance by placing it in a low-power mode when the system has been mostly idle for the last 10 seconds.

I could go on, but Windows has done this stuff since Windows 2000 and done it reasonably well in Windows XP and almost perfectly in Windows 7. Linux struggles with this constantly as it just was never designed to handle having devices which are not operating at 100% 24/7 [The windows power manager is a bastard but at least there is one, Linux has no real global power management infrastructure to speak of. There are a few specific subsystems like ACPI power manager and CPU frequency controller but there's no proper global framework that handles all this in a consistent and clean way].

In any case, Windows 98 did not have the power manager which was only invented for Windows 2000, so yeah, Windows 98's power management was practically non-existent.

Re: not surprising

[jones_supa]

Which is easy for MS to achieve as they're willing to implement a non-standard ACPI implementation rather than using the Intel implementation that everybody else uses. And write work arounds for buggy implementations rather than kick it back to the manufacturer to do correctly.

What workarounds? Even if I install the original Windows 7 with no updates on top of it, ACPI works flawlessly on most machines, both old and brand new (which didn't even exist when Win7 was released).

Re:not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

If i remember correctly a lot of the power management problems are due to the manufacturers not implementing the standards correctly

Which standards and how are they not implemented correctly?

Re: not surprising

[jones_supa]

Sadly, most companies won't allow the customer to talk directly to engineering.

Re: not surprising

[FireFury03]

Sadly, most companies won't allow the customer to talk directly to engineering.

I didn't want to talk directly to engineering, I just wanted someone to pass the patch on to the right people and get a fixed BIOS to a defective product line. Instead they thought it was better customer service to thrown my emails into the bitbucket. That's the kind of customer service that gets a company onto my blacklist.

Re:not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Trivial! Just slap the defibrillator paddles in there and hit the buttons. Shout clear if you want to appear cool. Helps of you put them on either side of the CPU.

Re:not surprising

[davester666]

Whoosh!

Re:not surprising

[jimicus]

Your options at the time for a Windows-like OS were Windows '9x or NT 4.

NT 4 didn't have any sort of power management whatsoever.

So in the context of the time, it's accurate.

Re:not surprising

[KGIII]

Good woman then. My ex was a bit of a fan (they said, I don't think I ever saw them use it) of FreeBSD. It's probably yet another lie from her though. Almost one year free from a relationship! Feels like quitting smoking a bit but it's so much better for my health.

Re:not surprising

[cerberusss]

Now it's probably true that the above issues are caused by third party drivers, and not Windows itself, but it still sucks.

I'm running a MacBook and for precisely this reason, I try to avoid hardware requiring 3rd party drivers. There are lots of better external wifi devices, but I'd rather not stick drivers in an otherwise perfectly operating machine. Same goes for stuff like VirtualBox or Parallels, which require weird drivers as well.

Re: not surprising

[garutnivore]

I share the same policy. I bought one and only one Acer in my life. It was the first Acer I bought and is the last. Early on it would not sleep under Linux so I took at look at the BIOS. That thing was so sloppily coded! The batteries that Acer shipped with the laptop also had a manufacturing flaw that caused them to fail prematurely. Batteries degrade over time progressively but these would one day perform at 90% original specs and the next day perform the best brick impression. I owned two Acer-approved batteries for this laptop and both failed in exactly the same way. I also bought an ultra-cheap third-party battery that did not show this problem.

Re:not surprising

[Stuarticus]

"It is now safe to turn off your computer"

Power management, 95 and 98 style, it almost always worked! Mostly.

Re:not surprising

[Alsee]

Oh heavens, it must be happening again. I'm obviously experiencing a relapse of those terrible hallucinations that have plagued me for years.
Oh, wait, she's real after all.

Dude, you posted a photo of a laptop sitting on the armrest of an empty couch ;)

-

Re: not surprising

[HuguesT]

My perfectly standard Gigabyte X58-UD5 + core i7 i920 from 2009 stubbornly refuses to sleep with win7. Works fine with Linux.

Re: not surprising

[dbIII]

I had a truly bizzaro experience where a guy at work said he "didn't want any of that old lenovo shit" and wanted an Acer. Because the thinkpads have looked similar for years he thought I was trying to give him a ten year old laptop, and since his girlfriend had an Acer he thought they were good. I stuck an SSD in it and more memory so it probably ended up half decent but I'll have to see how it lasts for him.

Re: not surprising

[Muad'Dave]

... stubbornly refuses to sleep with win7. Works fine with Linux.

At least she has some standards.

Re: not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Your problem was expecting that a script monkey whose job is to broadly define what standard reply a given email should get would be in touch with Acer's engineering. In fact, he was probably sitting in a support desk somewhere in Pakistan, and the only contact he (or his supervisor) has with Acer is a bunch of new standard replies every once in a while. You'd get the exact same response from any other hardware company.

Re:not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

But a goodlooking laptop!

Re: not surprising

[hedwards]

The ACPI implementation for Windows has always been rather lenient when it comes to errors that are in the DSDT for a motherboard. It works well now because Linux now contains most of the workarounds as well.

Basically the DSDT that shipped with a lot of the computers from years back wouldn't compile using the Intel compiler, and only under the compiler that MS was using at the time. So, in order to get the ACPI to work correctly, you'd have to decompile the DSDT and reprogram it to compile then you'd have to tell the computer to use that rather than the one on the mother board.

And, it was a tremendous PITA in some cases, in other cases you had to wonder why the developer didn't just spend the extra 5 minutes to get it right.

Re: not surprising

[bill_mcgonigle]

I had an experience with an ASUS mobo (P5Q) where the built-in NIC (Atheros, IIRC) was corrupting data. I got packet traces that showed clear patterns of bit rotation that were either happening in hardware or the driver.

Branching off of a bugzilla report, one of the driver programmers (from the manufacturer) and a couple other users with the same problem were comparing notes and doing specific tests when we got to the point of it not looking like a driver problem, and then the line went dead.

I can only assume that admitting to the problem would have precipitated a recall that was far too expensive to deal with.

I put in a $20 NIC and learned to never waste my valuable time helping a manufacturer figure out their problems. Report it (well), post a review where you bought it, and move on - spending 10 hours on a $120 mobo is foolish. Also, I don't buy ASUS gear anymore.

Re:not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

i've got a laptop that blue screens when you pull out the power cord...

My desktop does that as well. Except with a black screen.

Re: not surprising

[FireFury03]

The batteries do indeed seem to degrade quickly (even third party ones); and they seem to lose calibration very quickly too. The customer service is terrible and the BIOS has the aforementioned bug, but other than that the machine actually isn't too bad (which I guess is a good thing since customer support clearly aren't going to care if anything is wrong with it).

Re: not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

owing to their appealing customer support when advised that an entire product line had a bios bug

That is an amazing typo, it is the exact opposite of 'appalling'

Re: not surprising

[Zan Lynx]

What workarounds? Even if I install the original Windows 7 with no updates on top of it, ACPI works flawlessly on most machines, both old and brand new (which didn't even exist when Win7 was released).

You will sometimes see motherboard driver files for Windows which are simply ugly hacks to fix things without doing a BIOS update by hot-patching the board's ACPI, or overriding some Windows default so it works properly with the buggy board.

The right thing to do would be to issue a BIOS update or recall the board. But no, as long as they can hack in a software fix for Windows they go ahead and ship it.

Re: not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW, I now have a policy of avoiding Acer like the plague and advising my customers to do the same, owing to their appealing customer support when advised that an entire product line had a bios bug.

You make it sound like appealing customer support is a bad thing.

Re: not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

... stubbornly refuses to sleep with win7. Works fine with Linux.

At least she has some standards.

WorksForMe (http://www.tmrepository.com/trademarks/worksforme/)

Re: not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

... stubbornly refuses to sleep with win7. Works fine with Linux.

At least she has some standards.

Stop kidding yourself. Lying about how shitty Linux is isn't helping anyone.

Maybe not all the disconnects?

[AdamHaun]

Sarah's Google+ post has an update:

Update: Looks like this is an xHCI specific issue, and probably not the cause of the USB device disconnects under EHCI. To everyone who commented with other USB issues (none of which really sounded related), please email the linux-usb mailing list with a description of your issue.

USB sucks

[Skapare]

USB as a whole is already a silly design, having all these silly details and ambiguities. For example, where it has a minimum time (10ms in this case), it should also have a maximum time (for example 50ms). Devices should be able to communicate after that maximum time or they are broken. Actually, there should be a maximum time when powered up ... how is a minimum even useful for anything.

This only needs to specify controller communication, not device function. For example a hard drive might take several seconds to spin up and get in sync. But the controller should be able to do basic communication in 50ms, even if all it can say about the actual hard drive is "spinning up but not ready". USB has a lot of other stuff that is far from the KISS principle.

Re:USB sucks

[skids]

You're pulling your punches. USB was a completely half-ass standard to start with, and then was continually modified with half-ass frankenstein additions to provide features that were already in competing bus technologies, once its designers finally had to admit that those features were actually useful.

Anyway it is not much of a surprise that things can slip in the USB area. There are only a few developers who are both talented enough to work do it right and also have the patience for wasting their talent making the dung sculptures that USB stacks always turn out to be.

(Personally I think the better path would have been to just use CAT5 UTP with ethernet signalling but a frame protocol that would just shut down a port if it detected you plugging normal ethernet into the bus. Then all the ports could have been bios-configurable for either peripheral or network use.)

Re:USB sucks

[sl149q]

In the best of all worlds, devices should treat it as a maximum and hosts should treat it as a minimum.

Re:USB sucks

[TheGratefulNet]

well, you CAN plug a usb male connector into an rj45 jack.

it won't work, but it will fit just fine.

(stupid oversight. the last 15 or so years, cable and connector designers have been pretty idiotic. don't get me started on that rant..)

Re:USB sucks

[FrankSchwab]

In the SPEC, devices are required to treat it as a maximum and the host is required to treat it as a minimum. Any device which isn't ready for communications after 10 ms are broken, and any host that attempts communications before 10 ms is broken. This isn't an area of the spec that's in any way vague.

Re:USB sucks

[You're All Wrong]

You're not one of those heretics that thinks that ethernet was a bus technology that was both serial and universal, at the time that the so-called "USB" was invented, are you?

Re:USB sucks

[You're All Wrong]

Agreed.

Do we think that Sarah will receive some trademarked swearing because of this?
http://news.techeye.net/chips/linus-torvalds-and-intel-woman-in-sweary-spat
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/13/07/15/2316219/kernel-dev-tells-linus-torvalds-to-stop-using-abusive-language

I'm beginning to wonder if Sharp is a MS or Apple plant, sent into linux kernel work to sow seeds of antagonism and self-destruction.

Re:USB sucks

[tlhIngan]

You're pulling your punches. USB was a completely half-ass standard to start with, and then was continually modified with half-ass frankenstein additions to provide features that were already in competing bus technologies, once its designers finally had to admit that those features were actually useful.

Anyway it is not much of a surprise that things can slip in the USB area. There are only a few developers who are both talented enough to work do it right and also have the patience for wasting their talent making the dung sculptures that USB stacks always turn out to be.

Things in USB have generally been quite buggy and will always be that way - it's quite a complex spec and controllers and software never behave the way they should.

Take something like initial enumeration - the initial descriptor you read is 18 bytes long. Neither Linux nor Windows actually does an 18-byte read to get a full descriptor. I suppose it could be a USB test to ensure your controller software can handle an undersized read without screwing up.

Then there was the time I screwed up my USB descriptor (screwed up the type). End result was Linux kept panicking on me - the moment I plug it in, boom panic. (This was years ago. I would assume it's fixed). Windows didn't do anything.

I think part of the problem is basically there hasn't been any USB fuzzing tools, so most USB stacks are buggy and have lots of exploitable flaws. Hell, it was how the PS3 was exploited once.

Re:USB sucks

[KGIII]

Shh! You won't get burned at the stake around here - they'll burn you at the stack in these parts.

Re:USB sucks

[gnasher719]

USB as a whole is already a silly design, having all these silly details and ambiguities. For example, where it has a minimum time (10ms in this case), it should also have a maximum time (for example 50ms). Devices should be able to communicate after that maximum time or they are broken. Actually, there should be a maximum time when powered up ... how is a minimum even useful for anything.

There is a maximum time, which is 10ms. According to the spec, the kernel has to wait 10ms for the device to be ready. Say you have different kernels waiting 10, 20, 50 and 100 ms. A device that is ready after 15ms works on 3 kernels, but not on all 4, therefore it is broken. Actually, the device must be ready in 10ms, or it is broken.

"Minimum time the kernel has to wait" = "Maximum time the device is allowed to take to get ready".

Re:USB sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

As we say in Plan 9 world :

It's not Universal, it's not Serial and it's not a Bus.

Re:USB sucks

[localman]

As someone whose computer experience predates the birth of USB by many years, I find all the criticism of USB to be a hoot. I mean, sure, it's a mess compared with an ideal system, but oh my lord it's so much better than the mess we had before I don't even know what to say. When peripheral interconnects are so good that we resort to complaining about USB, it's a better world than I could have dreamed of 25 years ago.

Re:USB sucks

[serviscope_minor]

When peripheral interconnects are so good that we resort to complaining about USB, it's a better world than I could have dreamed of 25 years ago.

USB basically works now because a lot of very bright kernel developers have been beating it into submission since the late 90's.

I remember pre USB, with my DIN keyboard and RS-232 mouse, parallel Epson compatible printer, 10 Base T ethernet and floppy drive. They all worked just fine.

I also remember when USB started taking over and one had to keep PS2 keyboards and mice around just in case. Often to change BIOS settings. Oh and BIOS legacy mode etc etc.

USB does work, but honestly, cable thickness and speed aside it took a very long time before it came up to the "just works" state of previous things. It is a terrible spec and is decent now in spite of that not because of it.

Re:USB sucks

[jones_supa]

Have done that. These days I also find myself inserting an USB device to an HDMI port as they look similar enough.

Re:USB sucks

[eddy]

I did that yesterday.

Then I yelled at the phone for not charging.

Re:USB sucks

[Rich0]

I remember pre USB, with my DIN keyboard and RS-232 mouse, parallel Epson compatible printer, 10 Base T ethernet and floppy drive. They all worked just fine.

Sure, unless you decided to use two printers at once, or wanted to use both a mouse and a Palm Pilot, or you wanted to plug in a Zip drive or something else that used a parallel floppy controller, and so on.

The predecessors worked fine as long as you had no more peripherals than ports and each used the proper port so there was no contention. It was particularly painful for devices that were not persistent - such as if you wanted to use the same port to connect two different devices at various times.

Re:USB sucks

[dbIII]

That's what SCSI was for.

Re:USB sucks

[bruce_the_loon]

I wiped out an HDMI port on my TV doing just that. TV on, USB external drive plugged in, ports were right next to each other, didn't work, realized it was in the HDMI port and moved it. Six months later, discovered the HDMI was dead.

Re:USB sucks

[Rich0]

As long as you don't have more than 16 of anything, and didn't set the wrong address. :)

Oh, and back in that day virtually everything used daisy-chaining which isn't really practical for removable devices. That really wasn't a limitation in the bus itself though. The size of the cables was though.

Re:USB sucks

[bill_mcgonigle]

(stupid oversight. the last 15 or so years, cable and connector designers have been pretty idiotic. don't get me started on that rant..)

The Thinkpad power connector is just about the same width too, and right next to the Ethernet port. :P

That one is as much about ergonomics than connector size, though.

Re:USB sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not one of those heretics that thinks that ethernet was a bus technology that was both serial and universal, at the time that the so-called "USB" was invented, are you?

CAT 5 as metioned in the post you replied to isn't a bus. It's point to point, like USB. 10Base-2 was a bus.

Re:USB sucks

[kesuki]

i have known about this bug in linux for over 2 years, i simply never let my laptop go into suspend mode which triggers the bug as the hardware is unable to connect to usb devices after a software suspend mode is done. now i just have to wait on the fix to get into stable oses(like ubuntu).

Re:USB sucks

[slew]

Don't forget that wonderful SCSI termination scheme...
You never really knew how to set up the termination unless you dug up all the documentation.

Re:USB sucks

[localman]

As evidence of USB being an improvement I submit the explosion of USB devices, from cameras, to mp3 players, to thumb drives, to midi/digital audio interfaces, to webcams, to wifi adapters, to external CD and DVD for laptops, to...

You get the idea. The ubiquity of such devices could never have happened under the old system. The interfaces of yesteryear were a stumbling block for innovation in many ways. Thank god they're gone, and thank god we've got a brain-dead simple (from a user perspective) interconnect that is simple and cheap enough to implement from a developer perspective to have allowed the world to move on.

Remember, you can always roll back to the DIN/COM/LPT/FDC/IDE setup. Plenty of parts still around. Heck, I fire up a C64 emulator once in a while myself ;)

Re:USB sucks

[squiggleslash]

I think the "Firewire already does it", "PS/2 already does it", "Ethernet already does it" people for the most part unintentionally explain why USB was invented - and why the standard is so apparently ugly.

The point of USB is to be universal, to allow everything to be plugged into a single port. Ethernet wouldn't work for 90% of USB applications because (a) it's kinda bad for things like keyboards with buttons on them to power up the computer, (b) while power over Ethernet is kinda standardized, it's not terribly flexible or useful.

Is it beautiful? Hell no. USB has bits of every standard grafted onto it to make it work. But the thing is it works. It's a "Just works" technology, and that's why it existed. If we'd tried to use Ethernet for all of this, we'd still be hooking keyboards up to PS/2 ports and mobile devices would need a collection of cables and plugs when they're "docked".

Misinterpretation *By Linux*

[billstewart]

Unfortunately, the article's referring to the "misinterpretation" passively, not saying directly who the author is asserting misinterpreted the spec, but I think from context it seems to be saying "misinterpreted by Linux", as opposed to "misinterpreted by lots of cheapo USB devices". It's bad that Linux does that, but it's certainly easier to fix in one place in Linux than going out to lots of vendors putting out equipment with very low profit margins and hope they'll all do the right thing.

I was also a bit confused as to when the article was referring to microseconds (s) vs. milliseconds (ms); I found it surprising that it seemed to be saying that most of the devices responded in under a microsecond, while others were over 10ms.

Re:Misinterpretation *By Linux*

[smash]

Given that the spec says this is a MINIMUM value, then I'd say the misinterpretation is in Linux - by hard-coding in 10ms and attempting to use devices after that. As per TFA, an interrupt is generated by an xHCI controller when the device is ready to use again. So, blindly attempting to use the device again after 10ms is breakage in LINUX.

I'd also say that the USB spec is written in a pretty broken way to cause said confusion, but that's a whole new issue.

Re:Misinterpretation *By Linux*

[Darinbob]

I have used Linux in the past as a rough guideline to determine what something ambiguous means. The assumption is that the devices work in Linux and have been tested somewhat, therefore how Linux does things is a better first approximation of what I should do than just guessing. I also hedged this by looking at xBSD code which is easier to understand.

A lot of times when it's safest to just try and figure out what Windows does because there are countless devices that only support the commands that Windows sends. So even if the standard says command X shall be supported, if Windows never sends that command to a device chances are there are some devices that won't have it implemented properly. So a USB sniffer helps here. When it comes to commodity parts intended for generic PCs, standards are treated as suggestions.

Re:Misinterpretation *By Linux*

[FrankSchwab]

There is no ambiguity in the USB spec, and Sarah has an incorrect interpretation. The spec requires that the host provide at least 10 ms of recovery time coming out of suspend; a device is required to be able to communicate after this minimum time. Any device which isn't ready for communications after 10 ms of resume recovery time is broken. A host is permitted to provide more than this, but isn't required to.

So, yes, it's perfectly valid for the host to blindly attempt to communicate with the device after 10 ms - presuming that the host KNOWS precisely when the recovery period began. If the host requested that the bus resume, set a timer for 10 ms, and then tried talking, the HOST is at fault because it didn't check with the hardware as to when the resume period began. I think the 17 ms that they reference in the article is related to this - there is a delay between the request to resume the bus and the actual time that the hardware does resume the bus, so they were trying to talk with devices before the 10 ms period was up.

The device is perfectly within the spec if it ignores communications prior to 10 ms, or if it responds to them - it has complete flexibility. After 10 ms, however, it MUST be ready to communicate.

Re:Misinterpretation *By Linux*

[smash]

Meanwhile, USB works just fine on my Mac, Windows and FreeBSD hardware. Sounds like someone implemented the spec and someone is blaming everyone else.

Re:Misinterpretation *By Linux*

[You're All Wrong]

You are just plain wrong.

The standard mandate (a "must") that the host wait a minimum of 10ms. The linux kernel waits a minimum of 10ms. It is doing everything that is required of it by the standard. Therefore it is standards conforming. If shitty hardware isn't going to be ready for 17ms, then it is solely at fault. There is no ambiguity in the standard on this point.

Re:Misinterpretation *By Linux*

[You're All Wrong]

You have to remember that MS Windows violates the USB standard even though it was one of the authors of the standard, and because of this influence they have been able to pollute the conformance tests in order to work around their errors. Therefore the whole issue of compatibility is a very muddy one. Are you conformant to the standard, or to the test?

Re:Misinterpretation *By Linux*

[Anonymous Coward]

You can follow a standard and still have a shitty implementation.

Standard: Call client to inform them about issue
Linux: Calling client. Riiiiin(click)
Linux: Called client, didn't answer.

Re:Misinterpretation *By Linux*

[localman]

Sorry, but that's not how it works. If you want to say that there's a consensus to operate out of spec, that's fine, but according to the spec 10ms is the minimum amount of time before you can communicate. Which is another way of saying it's the maximum amount of time you have to get ready for communication. The Intel engineer that claimed it meant that they could take longer than that is an idiot - reading the spec that way makes it meaningless.

I think it is probably wise that other systems give a longer delay. In fact it seems a little naive to assume that every device is going to operate on such tight tolerances. There is also a chance, as the previous poster said, it may not really be giving 10ms, depending on how various signals get queued - if that's the case, then Linux was wrong, as opposed to the devices.

Whatever the case, it doesn't have to be an OS pissing match. Linux seems to have implemented the spec with no wiggle room beyond the spec. Other systems left wiggle room beyond the spec, which may have been wise. It's like browsers and quirks mode - rendering tag soup is kind of wrong, but you're not going to get a popular browser if you fail to render a page every time someone mis-nests their tags.

And I'm on a Mac, so this isn't an ego thing for me. I just like to keep the facts straight.

Re:Misinterpretation *By Linux*

[Anonymous Coward]

I very much doubt USB3 works just fine on any of those: it will cause trouble on FreeBSD, and Windows with a lot of piece-of-crap USB2/USB1 devices, as well as some USB3 devices (I know that from experience). And if everything works in the Mac, you must be using only a very select set of devices on that Mac...

Re:Misinterpretation *By Linux*

[Alsee]

I found it surprising that it seemed to be saying that most of the devices responded in under a microsecond, while others were over 10ms.

I'm pretty sure it was a single device that was tested 227 times.

The spec actually says the host must send a 20 ms wake up signal, then wait quietly for 10 ms. If we start counting from the beginning of the quiet period (the end of the wake up signal) then you get the odd seeming result that the device is usually ready "instantly <1 ms" and sometimes takes 13 ms. But if we start counting from the beginning of the wake-up signal we get the more reasonable seeming result that the device usually completes waking up in <21 ms and sometimes took up to 33 ms. The device was in violation of the spec in the occasional cases where the it took >30 ms to complete the activation.

-

Re:Misinterpretation *By Linux*

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear smash (1351),

Meanwhile, USB works just fine on my GNU/Linux hardware. Sounds like someone is using anecdotes as evidence.

Developer has posted an update

[aNonnyMouseCowered]

I don't know how relevant this new info is to the problem, but there's an update over at the Sarah Sharp's G+ page:

"Update: Looks like this is an xHCI specific issue, and probably not the cause of the USB device disconnects under EHCI. To everyone who commented with other USB issues (none of which really sounded related), please email the linux-usb mailing list with a description of your issue."

Captcha: corrects (I hope I'm not wrong.)

Resume? What's that?

[UltraZelda64]

Back in the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s when I used Windows, I realized sleep mode was a complete joke, unreliable, and just stopped using it by the time I upgraded to Windows XP or shortly after. In Linux, I am still not a fan of waiting for the damn thing to "wake up" for 5-10 seconds before it will even accept my password, so the only component that ever even enters standby on my machines is the moniter (and this has been the case for over a decade, even dating back to my last years in Windows). Windows, Linux--doesn't matter what the OS is, not putting the system into standby makes the whole experience much smoother, faster and hassle-free.

On the other hand, though--it is a good thing this was fixed for those laptop users out there.

Re:Resume? What's that?

[viperidaenz]

My 8 year old laptop running Windows XP usually wakes up in under 5 seconds from sleep.
When it was brand new it would last around 5 hours with the lid shut and turned on (it consumed around 10 - 12W idle with the screen off, with a 65Wh batter). On standby it would last weeks

Standby support for a laptop is mandatory..

Re:Resume? What's that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you talking about the hibernate or sleep function? I've always felt the same about hibernate, and sleep just started working for me in Linux this year -- on SimplyMepis 12 (KDE 4.8.4), my nine-year-old Thinkpad comes out of sleep almost instantly, and I have it set to not ask for my password after initially logging in.

Re:Resume? What's that?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm. Your experiences are your own. I put this thing to sleep all the time. Some kernels work a bit better than others. This one hasn't given me any issues (3.11.0-rc6). I think 3.11.0-rc5 might have had problems, but the 5 or 6 kernels previous to that were no problem.

Re:Resume? What's that?

[sunderland56]

My several-year-old laptop running Xubuntu *boots* in about 5 seconds.

Even now it lasts weeks when powered down. It consumes about 0 watts when powered down.

Standby support is only mandatory for OSes that take a rediculously long time to boot.

Re:Resume? What's that?

[UltraZelda64]

My problem is that I'm impatient: 5 seconds is too too for me to wait for a machine plugged into a wall outlet to become responsive, and all of my computers to date have been desktop machines. But I agree with you that standby is very important on a laptop.

I have never owned a laptop myself, but I likely will end up buying one at some point and have been considering what I will be doing as far as power management goes. I'm considering running the system 24/7 without the battery (to conserve it) and plugged into my desktop keyboard and monitor when it will be at home for a week or more at a time during which point I may turn off all power management features, and shut it down and plug the battery in when I leave, using various power saving modes when necessary... but I will still most likely just shut down whenever possible to get the biggest savings.

Overkill? More work than is typically done? Well, what can I say... I'm really, really not a fan of power management features, but I will use them when absolutely necessary, and even then only under special conditions. :p

If I'm going to have to wait anyway, the way I see it I might as well just go all the way and shut the machine down completely, saving the most battery when not in use for an extended period of time.

Re:Resume? What's that?

[hedwards]

Not true.

Standby is there for when you want to leave your desktop applications open and have the benefits of using less energy while you eat dinner or take a walk. Hibernation is great if you need that 0 watts of draw, but don't want to have to have all your programs closed down and to have to start from scratch.

Re:Resume? What's that?

[Anonymous Coward]

My two year old netbook (amd c-50; so slower than anything other than an Intel Atom) running Debian Wheezy wakes up from sleep in under a second (suspending is just as fast). For suspend to ram, amount of ram seems not to have any impact on time to suspend/resume-- netbook shipped with 2G, I've upgraded it to 8G without any change in suspend resume time.

Maybe you are thinking of suspend to disk ("hibernate"). That takes quite a bit longer, esp. if you have a lot of memory in use-- disk is slow.

Re:Resume? What's that?

[You're All Wrong]

Just tested: pm-suspend took a verbal count of "and one, and " before the final LED was off.
Pressing the power button to wake it up took a verbal count of "and one and t.." before I had the root prompt back, but it had remembered the carriage return that I had pressed a fraction of a second earlier. So let's call that about 1.5s in both directions.

At its highest frequency, it's this (but is currently ticking over at 800MHz, no idea how stressed it was during those few seconds):
model name : Intel(R) Atom(TM) CPU N270 @ 1.60GHz

I suggest you profile your system whilst suspend and resume are taking place. Your times are unnaturally high. dmesg will contain a fair bit of info, such as:
[18792.336078] PM: suspend of devices complete after 627.338 msecs
[18792.336340] PM: late suspend of devices complete after 0.254 msecs
and
[19427.808460] PM: resume of devices complete after 1499.933 msecs
[19427.942491] Restarting tasks ... done.
etc.

Re:Resume? What's that?

[UltraZelda64]

There are also different suspend levels. I think they are labeled S3 and something else in the BIOS, with one being slower, more extreme in energy saving, and more unreliable. Don't know (or care) about the difference, but again, I haven't messed with sleep mode in years (and will not again until I get a laptop). Anyway, this could be the reason for the speed difference (I do recall calling both modes, and one was much faster than the other). Also, maybe a bit less likely, over the years coming out of sleep mode--if it has, I would never know, because again... I don't use it.

Re:Resume? What's that?

[viperidaenz]

How long does it take Ubuntu to load all the applications you had previously open in the same state you left them?

Re:Resume? What's that?

[ledow]

To be honest, back in the 1990's - 2000's this was a problem. But so was a lot of other stuff.

I'm no Windows fan, but I have had Windows XP and Windows 7 laptops for the last 6-7 years. Both basically live their lives in standby or hibernate and a full boot or BIOS screen means I forgot to charge it.

They got turned on in the morning to check websites before work. Put into suspend. Taken to work. Opened and used for 8+ hours. Put into suspend. Taken home. Gamed/browsed on for the next 8 hours. Put into suspend for the night. And they would literally go for MONTHS between reboots (and then only against my will, such as updates, batteries not being charged fully, etc.).

To be honest, I haven't even thought about it in years. It used to be a big deal. There was a time where I turned off all power states because it was just that ropey. I can't remember the last time I had to do that. A machine that can't go into and out of suspend instantly, or that needs full boots even once a week, is one I'd start diagnosing.

I work in schools - pretty much the same thing there. Teachers just leave their laptops in standby overnight or take them home in standby and use them and they rarely see a BIOS screen. We have to make sure that Truecrypt pops up on system resume because it's so easy to leave them for weeks in suspend while you use them.

Same for desktop machines nowadays. With Windows 8 you really notice it because it's instant on/off back to the login screen. Nobody complains about boot times because they never witness them.

I don't know about Linux - I tend to run Linux for servers only so power-states are not something you want to happen, and elsewhere I rarely have proprietary drivers, but I imagine it's pretty much the same situation. Linux always did a better job than Windows for power resume whenever I used it, and they have had suspend-to-RAM and all sorts for years now. Just about every ARM Linux device I've ever seen spends its life in suspend. Even my TomTom from 10 years ago still has perfect suspend/resume functionality and has gone at least three years of daily use without ever doing a full boot.

Honestly... in a few years from now, once Windows 8 becomes the norm, people will be asking me what the hell the BIOS screen is and why they only see it when they first buy the computer.

Re:Resume? What's that?

[jones_supa]

Hibernation is also good for those laptops which blink a LED while on suspend, and when that happens in the dark when you're sleeping, you can see the whole damn room pulsing. Hibernation puts the machine off, and if you pull the power cord off too, you usually are left with no lights. Ahh.

Re:Resume? What's that?

[jones_supa]

My two year old netbook (amd c-50; so slower than anything other than an Intel Atom) running Debian Wheezy wakes up from sleep in under a second (suspending is just as fast).

On a sidenote, I have a netbook with AMD C-60 and unfortunately the turbo core feature does not work on Linux. The CPU can lower speed with cpufreq without problems, but I'm not sure if the Bobcat platform has proper turbo core support in place. AMD does some OSS work these days so I wonder if some smart guy there could actually fix this.

Re:Resume? What's that?

[QBasicer]

Yeah, I'm still not sure why hardware designers like to put the brightest blue LED on the face of the earth in every piece of electronics. My external HD could be used to land planes!

Note: I haven't consumed any coffee yet today so I can't vouch on the intelligibility of this post.

Re:Resume? What's that?

[UltraZelda64]

I've only extremely briefly played around with hibernate/suspend to disk, even less than regular suspend/sleep mode. Both modes in the BIOS were most definitely regular "sleep" modes. They only differed in just how many components they put to sleep. Hibernate is an interesting idea, but even it kind of irks me--in ways more than regular suspend. A can's bring myself to waste an entire 1GB on a swap partition just for the occasional hibernate, and that number is only going to explode with every new computer in the future I get.

Re:Resume? What's that?

[tlhIngan]

Back in the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s when I used Windows, I realized sleep mode was a complete joke, unreliable, and just stopped using it by the time I upgraded to Windows XP or shortly after. In Linux, I am still not a fan of waiting for the damn thing to "wake up" for 5-10 seconds before it will even accept my password, so the only component that ever even enters standby on my machines is the moniter (and this has been the case for over a decade, even dating back to my last years in Windows). Windows, Linux--doesn't matter what the OS is, not putting the system into standby makes the whole experience much smoother, faster and hassle-free.

On the other hand, though--it is a good thing this was fixed for those laptop users out there.

All the power save modes were a joke until XP or so - it was always a point of pride on the Mac side that one could close the lid, wait a few moments and then cart the laptop somewhere else. Or better yet, close the lid, and change the battery then open the lid and resume working as if nothing happened. If anything, working sleep mode was an expected feature on Mac, and a joke on PCs.

It started to change when Microsoft helped to create the ACPI spec - prior to this, power management was done by the BIOS (because of DOS), so systems more complex had to shut down everything, switch back to 16 bit real mode, then call the BIOS. That is, if the BIOS didn't do it underneath the OS in the first place (fun to be had!).

Problems abounded if you had peripherals. ACPI changed it by moving the power management responsibilities to the OS (if power-aware - if not power aware, it was the old BIOS behavior). So now the OS could do all the necessary work and put the system to sleep in an orderly fashion.

Of course, it took years from then for the OS, BIOS (ACPI) and device drivers to stabilize to the point where one could suspend/resume predictably.

Though, it's not all roses - there are still many things that can prevent a system from sleeping, leading to hot laptop syndrome where you close the lid and the laptop doesn't go to sleep. Unfortunately, Macs have regressed in this regard as well.

Re:Resume? What's that?

[hedwards]

It's because it's designed to look cool. Also, ideally you shouldn't have a computer in your bedroom. Obviously, that's ideal, I know that I have mine in my bed room, because I don't have other options. But, ideally computers shouldn't be where you're sleeping.

The annoying computers are the ones like the one I'm using that put that blue light in a place where it's not easily covered up. My battery charger has a huge blue light on it, but I can easily obscure it by putting a pack of cards or similar item over the top of it. The blue light on my computer is the only visible sign that the computer is on, and is right on the power button, making it hard to cover with sufficient tape to make it not light up the whole room.

Impossible, she's too hot

[Gothmolly]

She's too hot to be a programmer. This is clearly a front or shill by some middle-aged neckbeard.

Welcome to EE

[Ignacio]

The 10ms is for the software. The flip side of this is that the hardware has a maximum of 10ms to get its shit together so that it can be connected to. And 10ms is forever in hardware.

Re:Welcome to EE

[jamesh]

The 10ms is for the software. The flip side of this is that the hardware has a maximum of 10ms to get its shit together so that it can be connected to. And 10ms is forever in hardware.

Dear Linux kernel, i'll be ready when my disk is done spinning up. kthanksbye

Re:Welcome to EE

[Ignacio]

The 10ms is for the software. The flip side of this is that the hardware has a maximum of 10ms to get its shit together so that it can be connected to. And 10ms is forever in hardware.

Dear Linux kernel, i'll be ready when my disk is done spinning up. kthanksbye

Dear USB hard drive, that's fine, but don't go and disconnect from the USB bus in the meantime. Forever waiting, Linux kernel.

Re:Welcome to EE

[FrankSchwab]

And 10ms is forever in hardware.

Not if the hardware is composed of a microprocessor, and the hardware holds the CPU in reset for 2 ms waiting for the crystal to stabilize before letting it run.

The 10 ms is for the DEVICE to get it's shit together. Coming out of suspend, the host starts sending SOF's, and must not send anything else to the device for 10 ms. The DEVICE is required to be ready for communications from the host after this 10 ms period.

Re:Welcome to EE

[You're All Wrong]

^^^ Someone who understands the issue.

More than Sarah Sharp does, by the sound of it.

Re:Welcome to EE

[Gaygirlie]

The 10ms is for the software. The flip side of this is that the hardware has a maximum of 10ms to get its shit together so that it can be connected to. And 10ms is forever in hardware.

Atleast with the case of xHCI the 10ms is actually a minimum for both -- the specs do not indicate a maximum for the hardware to resume at all.

Re:Welcome to EE

[Alsee]

Atleast with the case of xHCI the 10ms is actually a minimum for both -- the specs do not indicate a maximum for the hardware to resume at all.

That's not how specifications work. Both sides are required to obey the spec for things to work. A minimum for one side is a maximum for the other side.

It's like we have a lunch break specification. The specification says that on a lunch break he must wait a minimum 30 minutes before sending the employee more work to do. This means the employee has a maximum 30 minutes to finish lunch.

What is happening here is that the employer (the computer) is obeying the spec. It's waiting the required minimum time, then sending a message "here's some work to do". The employee (the USB device) is late, still lingering out to lunch (in violation og the lunch rules) when he gets the work message. This employee (device) is responding "I'm not ready, I quit" and goes home (device disconnect).

-

Re:Welcome to EE

[Anonymous Coward]

The 10ms is for the software. The flip side of this is that the hardware has a maximum of 10ms to get its shit together so that it can be connected to. And 10ms is forever in hardware.

Dear Linux kernel, i'll be ready when my disk is done spinning up. kthanksbye

Dear USB hard drive, that's fine, but don't go and disconnect from the USB bus in the meantime. Forever waiting, Linux kernel.

Mwahaha. User.

Re:Welcome to EE

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't read the spec farther than what Sharp posted in TFS, but perhaps the spec is just poorly written?

Re:not surprising, since there are few docs

[dltaylor]

Far too many vendors are only willing to provide chip documentation under a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA), which prevents a knowlege-, as opposed to empirical-based Linux driver. This allows them to kludge around chip deficiencies in a Windows driver without the user being aware of any issues. Even Intel has started making it harder to get the real manuals for their CPUs and bridges (they used to ALL be published on Intel's FTP and HTTP sites). Frequently, in System-on-Chip (SoC) implementations, even the CHIP vendors don't know anything; they just pass along whatever quick and dirty proof of concept the designers of some feature of the chip provided and call it a "working driver", while it is nothing that would pass even a cursory QA process.

The first Linux code I wrote was a "quirk" handler for a parallel ATA PCI chip that came up programmed to the same default I/O addresses as the South Bridge's internal ports, and a BIOS that didn't properly perform PCI enumeration on it, since it already had PCI addresses.

So I can close my laptop now?

[kriston]

So I can close my laptop now instead of carrying it around like a sort of open pizza box for fear of never having a working mouse until the next reboot? How annoying to start a meeting by rebooting a Linux laptop.

Re:So I can close my laptop now?

[Yoda222]

Why do you need a mouse ?

Re:So I can close my laptop now?

[paskie]

Not sure why would you fear for never having a working mouse until the next reboot, but besides that, may I kindly suggest configuring your laptop not to go to sleep when the lid closes? It really doesn't have to do that if you don't wish it to.

Re:So I can close my laptop now?

[kriston]

That's the obvious solution, but, really, my computer should not lose the ability to be controlled by a USB device just because it went to sleep when the lid was closed. My Windows laptop has done this successfully for, like, fifteen years now?

Re:So I can close my laptop now?

[Osgeld]

exactly

the problem according to the linux crowd is you want your computer to go into a low power state during periods of transport, nevermind that the lowest common denominator does it just fucking fine

its your hardware's problem and your choice to use it like a normal person

Re:So I can close my laptop now?

[tlhIngan]

Why do you need a mouse ?

Because most laptops generally have terrible pointing devices. If they have touchpads, they're usually far too tiny to be useful (Apple ones excluded - why can't others put big ass touchpads on their laptops?)

The rubber trackpoint ones are nice for PCs, though the rubber tips wear down way too quickly and you end up with a slippery lump in short order.

And practically all are pathetic at scrolling. Unless it's an Apple trackpad where the double finger scroll works (once you fix the ()#@% scroll direction).

Life's just generally easier with an external pointing device.

Re:So I can close my laptop now?

[You're All Wrong]

So the ratpoison fanbois are out in force today, eh? [ http://ratpoison.nongnu.org/ ]

Re:So I can close my laptop now?

[Barsteward]

i prefer a mouse as well, what i'd really prefer would be a laptop with a touch screen. i hate touchpads etc.

Re:So I can close my laptop now?

[_merlin]

may I kindly suggest configuring your laptop not to go to sleep when the lid closes? It really doesn't have to do that if you don't wish it to

No you may not. I want it to spin down the disk for shock resistance while it's in my bag, and cut its power consumption so I'll have a useful amount of battery left when I get to wherever I'm going. I'm not going to shut down, because I don't want to lose where I was in all my applications. This is as bad as Microsoft IIS "it's not a bug - it's a feature" spin.

Re:So I can close my laptop now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you lug your laptop around with a mouse plugged into the USB slot? Surely you're going to knock the connector and break the USB mouse at the very least.

PS if you're running the meeting, then you shouldn't be getting your laptop ready in the ten seconds before it starts anyway. Please at least TRY to be professional.

Of course, your probably making this entire thing up because you

a) won't use Linux because it's communist (ie not a merkin company)
b) aren't allowed to run meetings

Re:So I can close my laptop now?

[paskie]

kriston was complaining about having to carry his laptop around "open like a pizza box". I'm not saying it's fine his laptop cannot suspend, but that it's silly to always keep your laptop open even if so [1]. I guess it was meant just as a figure of speech, but I don't think it works very well. ;-)

It's all a little puzzling for me. If the device doesn't work like you'd like it to, either adapt to it if it's a minor thing, or *get rid of the thing* and get a properly working device (by replacing either hardware of software). If you want to keep running Linux, it's not like more than just a small minority of hardware is having trouble (especially if you spend two minutes googling before buying the thing). Return your laptop, sell it on ebay, pass it on to friends/family (or swap with them!) or whatever and get a properly working one?

Perhaps kriston had, but I've seen way too many people going through absurd hassles with their devices, suffering almost ostentiously - both on Linux and Windows. They'll just complain on internet forums and hang on to their device because they like the socket layout on its right side or whatever.

[1] A possible exception may be broken display suspend, which may be unavoidable on lid close on some laptops. See the second paragraph in that case.

Re:So I can close my laptop now?

[Anonymous Coward]

You wouldn't have to reboot, just unplug and plug your mouse back in. In case of a built in Touch pad or keyboard, you just may have better luck after suspending and resuming another time. On the other hand, built in devices are very likely to be fast enough to resume that they need significantly less than 10ms to wake up.

Re:So I can close my laptop now?

[oojah]

Not to argue with your main point, but 15 years ago USB 1.1 had only just been released. USB 1.0 was pretty rare. I doubt Windows 98 had USB working without problems either.

Re:So I can close my laptop now?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but acting like a spoiled kid regarding it is not a solution either ("then i just walk around with it open" what a martyr you are!) there are a few alternative solutions, nothing is ever perfect, if this is a big issue for you why dont you change to an OS that works for you and let those of us who have never had any problems get on with our work, let the devs get fixing and use an alternative OS or fix until it works.

All we have so far is that a pronblem has been spotted, now we need to find the cause and then solve it - but you seem to want to be the guy standing on the side yelling at those working that they should work harder because you need it. you picked the OS to start with, you picked your poison - you are the one who can make a new choice.

Re:So I can close my laptop now?

[bill_mcgonigle]

My previous MSI laptop did this. Try to hop over to a VT (ctrl-alt-f2) and back to X to get the input modules to reinitialize.

Re:So I can close my laptop now?

[Anonymous Coward]

How annoying to start a meeting by rebooting a Linux laptop.

No kidding, waiting ten seconds is such a motherfucking nightmare.

Re:So I can close my laptop now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Many pointing devices on laptops are implemented as USB devices. To the OS, they are indistinguishable from an external USB mouse.

Re:Happy Thursday from The Golden Girls!

[Anonymous Coward]

idiot

Just try to boot from a USB drive that powers off

[ralphaostrander]

Unless the USB is on. It does not wake in time. Craptastic.

Learn to punctuate

[Anonymous Coward]

According to Sharp the USB core is to blame for the disconnections rather than the devices themselves as the core doesn’t wait long enough for the devices to transition from a “'esume state to U0.' The USB 2.0 standard states that system software that handles USB must provide for 10ms resume recovery time (TRSMRCY) during which it shouldn’t attempt a connection to the device connected to that particular bus segment."'

Wow, ever heard of something called "comma"? Let me fix that for you.

According to Sharp, the USB core is to blame for the disconnections, rather than the devices themselves, as the core doesn’t wait long enough for the devices to transition from a “'esume state to U0.' The USB 2.0 standard states that system software that handles USB must provide for 10ms resume recovery time (TRSMRCY), during which it shouldn’t attempt a connection to the device connected to that particular bus segment."'

See? Much easier to understand now. Other than that, I'm guessing that "esume" is a typo, and the quotation marks are all messed up too.

Re:Learn to punctuate

[ebno-10db]

Wow, ever heard of something called "comma"?

Wow, ever heard of something called a "comma"?

I also don't find that commas make that paragraph any more readable.

what is this mouse of which you write?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have toggle switches and neon bulbs for an interface.

Re:what is this mouse of which you write?

[Anonymous Coward]

on laptop?

Re:what is this mouse of which you write?

[Anne Thwacks]

Its a "luggable" and fits nicely in the back of a 7.5 ton truck!

It explains a lot!

[gagol]

That is why my laptop sd-card reader is not working when I close the lid... until reboot. F!*$&%" usb...

Re:It explains a lot!

[smash]

Works for me. Oh, you're running Linux? :)

Re:It explains a lot!

[gagol]

Yeah, laugh all you want, it is the only issue I had with linux in 8 years... I saw much more trouble on Windows PC's at work/friends. Byut you know what? I dont care if you prefer Windows, Linux or even Mac! Not everybody likes playing guitar, not everybody have the same needs. That being said, I prefer a defective sd card reader than running Windows 8 anyday.

Re:It explains a lot!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen several SD readers that don't recover from suspend or hibernate, on *Windows*; I never assumed it was Windows' fault.
I also have a notebook at work that doesn't hibernate on Windows, but does on Linux :-/

BTW please do a little experiment: change some USB port of some of your devices and count how many seconds Windows takes to reconfigure the device; on Linux, it's always instantaneous. Who's laughing now?

Re:It explains a lot!

[Anonymous Coward]

I solved this by adding a hook in the go-to-sleep init level script
somewhere (can't quite recall exactly where right now) to unload the
usb-* drive kernel modules before putting it to sleep, then re-inserting
them upon wakeup. I found the solution in some forum post for my laptop
model. now it works for me.

it's solvable. good luck!

Re:It explains a lot!

[smash]

My point is that others (including FreeBSD) appear to have gotten the implementation of the spec right.

Re:It explains a lot!

[gagol]

Hopefully it will be addressed soon. (Yeah, I love the BSDs too ;-)

Everybody else knows this

[Tablizer]

See, a non-geek would know that you have to wait for a while before you ask the same girl out again after a failure to connect the first time.

Re:Happy Thursday from The Golden Girls!

[jones_supa]

These weird spam/troll messages are part of what makes Slashdot so unique. ;)

Automatic driver synthesis

[FithisUX]

Normally one could write the USB spec (lets say X spec) in a high level language (that specifies behavior, say HLL) as a reference implementation that could be taken by the OS (any OS) to derive the driver. This spec should be provided by the X standards body (could b even a company) . Moreover it could interface to Y spec in the same high level language and still generate a X:Y composite driver or even create two drivers at kernel level that interface with some OS specific way. The standards body could verify X or X:Y for correct operation and publish it along with the PDF spec. The problem is that many people believe that the knowledge of C or some kernel internals are a form of qualification when we live in 2013. The real qualification is to create the HLL to kernel interface translator. Science is lacking from software in many many circumstances. Companies, selfish programmers f@^(ing money are to blame. But the problem is that OSes far better than commercial ones fail because of lack of drivers. Or equivalently by the lack of mapping the spec to their kernel interface in a hand-written time consuming error prone way due to complexity. The big thing is how to write the kernel (or the microkernel) to support apps known as drivers .... among others. We have functional, logic and functional logic languages. But we still live in caves imposed by companies and incompetent programmers that act like priests in ancient Egypt and companies that cheat on their customers. The above article shows a big symptom of a deep problem in CS. It is lack of professionalism, lack of scientific method and lack of freedom. The HW companies should only sell hardware accompanied with documentation. They should not be allowed to give drivers for an OS which poses a competitive advantage to a company. It should be illegal. This is not about OSS, its about common sense. However the UEFI secure boot and recent NSA story say something different. It says that there are no government entities willing to pose limits on the power of companies. Instead they fuel them. The paradox arising is that in 2013 many develop like in 70s. It is a form of autism, it is a kind of slavery, it is a sign of decay.

Re:Automatic driver synthesis

[serviscope_minor]

Wow, a massive block of text with no paragraph breaks spanning several topics and a few complete diversions... werre you one of the USB spec authors by any chance?

Re:Automatic driver synthesis

[jones_supa]

Aaahh...my poor eyes...

Year of Linux on the deskop

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, somebody fix this fast. Otherwise 2014 may not be the year of Linux on the desktop with these crappy USB problems. End users shouldn't have to patch and recompile their kernel IMO.

Kickstarter idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe all you need is the right protective sleeve that fits the laptop in this positon. Like two sleeves sewed together or something. Or something like a plastic box with a handle ? Could be included: a Teensy based USB device that sends mouse events every 30 seconds to prevent computer from going to sleep. See ? Problem "solved".

Re:linux is atrocious

[_merlin]

Parent is a troll, but s/he has a point. All this talk about sleep mode being useless sounds more than a little silly from the POV of a Mac user. Macs have had fast, reliable sleep/wake since the second generation G3s around 2000. Windows has kinda caught up. You really want this if you actually use a notebook computer. I don't want to have to go saving and closing everything then shutting down when it's time to get on the plane, then having to open it all again and get back to where I was once I'm on my way to Hong Kong. I just want to be able to flip it shut and put it in the bag, then flip it open when I'm in my seat and be right where I was.

Fat chance

[Damouze]

You might as well try to tell the Sun not to set tonight.

Re:not surprising, since there are few docs

[Anne Thwacks]

Far to many companies are prepared to buy chips with documentation under NDA. I would expect engineers who specify these chips to be sacked by a sensible manufacturer.

ABI rules.

[leuk_he]

However the rules changes about breaking applications:
-Security. If there needs a security bug to be fixed (null pointer checks and so on) all bets about compability are off.
-open standards. If some standard like posix says a function should return X and linux returns Y, THen there is the choice to stay on the linux island and keep returning X or change the ABI to be compliant to some other unix.

And if you use the wrong language to some maintainer (since you are an engineer, not a politician....), or happen to do something in a subsystem that has an inactive maintainer you patches will stay silently in some unknown patch queue.

is this why linux always corrupts flashdrives?

[Anonymous Coward]

pulling an usb from linux without 'ejecting' it first always corrupts my usb drives under linux. but never ever under windows.

Re:is this why linux always corrupts flashdrives?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe this is actually because Windows by default flushes buffers to flash drives immediately, where Linux treats mounted flash as any other drive with delayed flushing.

Re: is this why linux always corrupts flashdrives?

[Anonymous Coward]

In NT4, 2000, and XP, Windows defaulted to use write-caching for removable storage -- but you could turn it off. In Vista and later, the default is to disable write-caching and write directly to disk -- so once the drive's access light stops blinking, your filesystem's in a coherent state, and it can be removed with no trouble. The write-cache option's still available, if you care to select it.
(Historical details subject to vagaries of memory... maybe the cutoff was a different version.)

In Linux, there are also similar options (the "sync" and "dirsync" mount option -- both are disabled by default at the kernel level) -- most distributions, however, ship with some udev rules to automount removable storage, and these rules may or may not specify one of the sync options.

Now it may seem like Windows works and Linux doesn't (and now you may wonder why any Linux distro wouldn't simply enable the sync mount option), but it's not so simple; while it requires a bit of bothered not to unplug the storage before unmounting it cleanly, write-caching does increase performance. Moreover, the cache-less mode can decrease the life of flash-based storage, by making multiple writes to the same flash block which would have been combined in the cache. (Note that wear-leveling has nothing to do with this -- they won't all map to the same physical block, but it's still multiple writes vs. one write.) This is not likely to be of practical significance for most flash-based storage devices, and of course has nothing to do with disk drives, but there are legitimate arguments for either.

Really, both defaults are reasonable, and the sane thing is to quit complaining about the defaults and learn how to set either operating system to whatever's best for you. Personally, I run write-caching on desktops, and cacheless on laptops, as USB plugs there are more likely to be jostled out, and because I've occasionally been known to run laptops right down to zero battery (e.g. on a long plane flight).

pm-suspend-hybrid

[Artemis3]

Try pm-suspend-hybrid, this will initiate a normal hibernate: copy ram to disk as usual, but at the end it won't shutdown, but go into suspend. Result: If you come back, its instant on; but if the power ran out or was unplugged, your state is still saved and you return from hibernation.

People still unplug their stuff or let the batteries run out so don't expect that scenario until a memory technology that keeps its state without power (such as mram) becomes the norm.

Re:not surprising, since there are few docs

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does it matter if you need to sign an NDA when buying chips?
I mean you get all the documentation anyway, you just cant share it.

Re:linux is atrocious

[InfiniteLoopCounter]

All this talk about sleep mode being useless sounds more than a little silly from the POV of a Mac user. Macs have had fast, reliable sleep/wake since the second generation G3s around 2000.

Yeah, but the world is often full of ironies -- if you want to do basic things like get hybrid sleep or hibernate on a Mac you have to engage in minor programming. To get the Mac to stay awake when you close the lid requires minor programming. Getting the Mac to wake on network command or application response requires minor programming. It is far from simple to use unless you are using it to show off how much you can spend on a computing device.

Re:linux is atrocious

[_merlin]

Yeah, but the world is often full of ironies -- if you want to do basic things like get hybrid sleep or hibernate on a Mac you have to engage in minor programming. To get the Mac to stay awake when you close the lid requires minor programming. Getting the Mac to wake on network command or application response requires minor programming.

Wake on LAN is a single checkbox, so you're flat out wrong on that one. Suppressing sleep with lid closed would be nice, I'll give you that. But what exactly is "hybrid sleep" and why would I need "hibernate"? If the battery goes completely dead, it will restore RAM from disk. The most common use case (i.e. flip notebook shut, take it somewhere, flip it open, start using it) is covered very well, and this is something that Linux still doesn't get right, and I see nothing to suggest it gets the other cases you've mentioned any more right. Anyway, I care far more about being able to use my notebook computer while travelling than I do about checklists, and OSX definitley does that better. (Yes, Lion and Mountain Lion are shit, Final Cut Pro X is shit, and the new Mac Pro is shit. I may not ever buy another Mac. But at least for now, Linux isn't a viable alternative on a notebook, and whatever I choose will have to run Adobe Lightroom because there's really no alternative for me.)

Re:not surprising, since there are few docs

[dltaylor]

You cannot share the real functionality of the chip registers by documenting them in a working Linux (GPLv2) driver.

One sorta fix for this (for linux, anyhow)

[Skiron]

My Samsung notebook showed the same behaviour running Linux Mint (I don't touch MS stuff, and haven't for 11 years or so). The solution I found was to turn off suspend in BIOS - then the OS puts the notebook to sleep on lid shut, and to wake it up just hit (or in my case 'slide') the power button. Still two steps, but I find it easier and quicker rather than waggling the lid up and down. On another note, my wife's Acer notebook suspend works perfectly running Ubuntu.

Non-Sucky OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows, Linux--doesn't matter what the OS is, not putting the system into standby makes the whole experience much smoother, faster and hassle-free.

I switched from FreeBSD to OS X about ten years ago and sleeping/waking has always worked properly since.

Re:Non-Sucky OS

[UltraZelda64]

Meh, well it's no surprise that by ordering a computer from a company that also provides the operating system you will end up a system that's relatively well put together in terms of hardware/driver support in the OS. On the other hand, I don't want to live in Apple's walled garden and can't stand their business practices, so you can have your Mac and I'll just stay far, far away.

Re:Non-Sucky OS

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no walled garden in OS X, but please, don't let your blind fanboyism prevent you from running a decent OS.

A few years ago I switched from running a Linux desktop 100% of the time to OS X and couldn't be happier. I simply don't have the time to waste fixing the sound, networking and video driver issues that always came up. Plus, I can run almost all the GNU software I need, as well as tons of commercial apps. My Mac Pro workstation (8-core Xeon and 24GB of RAM) also ended up being cheaper than the closest Dell, even though the Dell had an older-gen CPU.

FINALLY, someone listens

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been filing bug reports against usbcore for violating this USB spec for nearly 8 months, only to have them angrily dismissed as being "incorrectly interpreting the USB standard."

So, now I get to say it:

I INFORMED YOU THUSLY

and

FUCK YOU.

Re:FINALLY, someone listens

[Anonymous Coward]

And you've been FLAT OUT WRONG for 8 months. So is Ms Sharp.

Spec says the device MUST be ready to receive commands after 20ms SOF + 10ms silence. Linux sends 20ms of SOF and stays silent for 10ms. If a device isn't ready after that, it's out of spec and thus BROKEN.
It's not the kernel developers job to cater to device manufacturers shitting out broken crap.

oh, and

FUCK YOU.

Re:FINALLY, someone listens

[Anonymous Coward]

I have MSO signal captures that prove Linux violates the spec. 7.1ms is not greater than 10ms.

Re:FINALLY, someone listens

[lpq]

The linux core developers have built their reputation on ignoring anyone's advice/input. They have done well, but their process for allowing necessarily disruptive changes into the kernel is frightfully closed.

I, myself, suggested / pointed out security problems, only to be ignored and have 0-day exploits released a few weeks later. If I was seeing the problems, it was likely others were too -- and they were. I was told I didn't know what I was talking about.

I also suggested a login-user-id for user-tracking (implemented 6 years later as an audit id) and suggested going to a 64-bit word size for block-offsets (was told it would kill performance in the kernel and would never happen -- about 3-4 years before their backs were to the wall and were forced to do so on a much accelerated and uncomfortable-for-all schedule.

They rarely think *ahead* and tend to be *reactive* in development rather than pro-active. They fact that Linus has been a rigid task/whip master, a loyal core, has allowed him to push hard-enough to be good in the "reactive" role -- but that development mode burns people out. The last
great innovative change that went into the kernel was the O1 scheduler and the auto-grouping of tasks for the CFQ.

Now I see a reactive focus on increasing parallelization for multi-cpu's while not giving as much thought to how those increases need to have infrastructure to support 100-way parallelism (you can't have 100 writers on a 100-core intel cpu (they have such a beast w/each running at
1GHz) going to any disk subsystem other than a 400-disk RAID10, that can use that type of CPU parallelism...oh well...

They ARE better than the alternatives... feels like a US presidential election -- where you vote for one guy who isn't so great, because the alternative is much worse.

Oi.

Re:not surprising, since there are few docs

[updatelee]

few reasons, some NDA do not allow you to share any work derived from information in the datasheets. ie no open source. Another problem Ive encountered is the fact that many chips are not designed by the company selling them, companies buy the orig company to gain their IP alone, and dont care about the actual chipset anymore.

The saa7160 was orig designed by Phillips, then NXP took it over, they then sold it to Triden Micro, they are now bankrupt and in receivership. So the datasheets are lost forever, anyone that signed an NDA in the past do not have the right to distribute them, and there is no way to get a person to get a datasheet.

The CX24132/CX24117 were orig designed by Conexant, then sold the NXP which promptly stopped production, NXP only releases datasheets to products they sell to encourage sales (often they only release them along with the purchase order). Those datasheets are lost forever as well.

NDA's have many downfalls, its not as cosy as you imply

UDL

I use resume to RAM every day

[Parker Lewis]

I have a Dell XPS, and I use Kubuntu 12.04. I use suspend to RAM everyday, rebooting only on kernel updates. So, just to make clear: the problem is on chipo devices, and this affects not only Linux.

Re:Happy Thursday from The Golden Girls!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. A 3-digit account falls for one of the most classic "wrong word" trolls? What strange days we live in.

Why USB cables suck

[sjbe]

(stupid oversight. the last 15 or so years, cable and connector designers have been pretty idiotic. don't get me started on that rant..)

I'll do that rant since I run a company that manufactures cables and cable assemblies. I can't speak to the software (I'm not a software guy) but the hardware on USB cables is less than impressive. They designed it to have a cheap controller but at the expense of needlessly complicated and expensive cables. That would have been ok if the cables themselves were well designed but they're pretty flawed designed in my opinion.

The USB connectors are keyed, presumably for cost and safety reasons. Now that isn't an entirely bad idea since you obviously don't want a connector to plug in the wrong way. But they could have designed it so that you didn't have to worry about orientation at all. Seems like everytime I try to insert a USB cable it invariably is upside down. While I'm not a huge fan of Apple's Lightning connector, the fact that I don't have to fuss with orientation when inserting is a terrific feature. I shudder to think how many many hours have been wasted by trying to insert USB cables upside down. It wouldn't be hard to have a wiring topology that figures out the orientation and behaves accordingly.

Many USB cables use different connectors on each end. This was done to mechanically prevent two powered devices from causing problems to each other. While simple it really is kind of a bandaid fix that needlessly increases the price of every USB cable. The devices should have enough smarts to handle that rather than using an unnecessary and costly second connector on every single cable. So now we have at least six different standard USB connectors when there should be at most two and probably just one.

USB cables are almost exactly the same width as the 8P8C (commonly called RJ45) ethernet connectors so as pointed out before you can insert on into that socket. They easily could have designed it to a different width than another super common connector on PCs.

USB cables are not physically robust. I've seen quite a few destroyed even without rough handling. The connectors simply aren't designed to be as durable as it should be.

I'm pleased

[JustNiz]

I'm pleased someone has finally diagnosed (and presumably will fix) this.
As presented, the cause actually sounds quite simple so I'm surprised how long its taken to get to it (several years) given how widespread Linux is and how many corporates are paying people to make Linux better.

Re:I'm pleased

[oh_my_080980980]

Really? Read the comments: "The computer is required to wait a minimum of ten milliseconds before imitating any work." Linux is functioning properly. USB devices are violating the spec. How long is the OS suppose to wait? 10ms, 15 ms, 20 ms, 30 ms....that the problem. All the author discovered was a work around. Nothing more.

Re:not surprising, since there are few docs

[wiredlogic]

Non-free hardware documentation is generally a problem but in this case all of the USB specs are available for free.

Re:linux is atrocious

[Anonymous Coward]

But what exactly is "hybrid sleep" and why would I need "hibernate"? If the battery goes completely dead, it will restore RAM from disk.

FWIW That is Hybrid Hybernation (suspends to ram/saves to disk) so that if power fails (battery dies/unplugged/blackout) your work is still there. Takes a bit longer unless it's an SSD for the system to return to a usable state

Re:linux is atrocious

[Anonymous Coward]

Please explain how any operating system can wake from an application response. If there is application code executing, the computer is not asleep.

Also, Macs do hybrid sleep right out of the box. The machine initially suspends to RAM, then when the battery gets to a certain threshold, it hibernates. If a particular model didn't have that set by default, executing 'pmset -a hibernatemode 3' will change it. I don't think most people would consider that "minor programming" at all. No other OS does sleep better than that.

Leaving the system running with the lid closed is a bad idea because the heat sink vents are covered up. Not sure what your use case is for that one, but when I need mine running unattended, I just let the screen go to sleep and leave it cracked open about an inch.

The GPL v 4.0

[shiftless]

Anyone desiring to use Linux will be required to print out the entire Linux source code (on an Epson dot matrix printer), read every page, and then initial it to confirm their understanding. This will be mailed in to the FSF to track compliance.

If there are any bugs found then everyone who signed that page gets their license revoked.

I am sure with this fool proof plan the Linux userbase will double in no time!

Re:not surprising, since there are few docs

[Anonymous Coward]

Often you don't have a choice. Mobile SoCs, image sensors, and networking are all NDA'd up, to give a few examples.

Re:Happy Thursday from The Golden Girls!

[Iskender]

Yeah, the other sites can do many things better, but their trolls are really horrible. Boring, bland, and yet people still get angry.

Whereas on Slashdot, things are naked and petrified all the way.

Re:linux is atrocious

[InfiniteLoopCounter]

Wake on LAN is a single checkbox, so you're flat out wrong on that one. Suppressing sleep with lid closed would be nice, I'll give you that. But what exactly is "hybrid sleep" and why would I need "hibernate"?

Reason why I wrote what I did is that I used to work in an organization that exlcusively used Macintosh laptops, and I needed to use all the features I raised and actually did implement them using scripts and terminal commands (on "Leopard"). Getting an application to wake the computer was especially hard from either a background thread or server response. If ound that the hibernate feature was actually part of the OS, but was hard to activate precisely because it sometimes left you with a blank or grey screen when you opened the lid, requiring you to either hold the off button and restart or close the lid and open it again after a period of time. Macs are not the panacea they are made out to be.

High-fives and a Cherry Coke

[bjoswald]

Although this stuff is way over my head, I admire Sarah for all of her hard work in such a cut-throat industry. Being a woman, I can't imagine the extra pressure she has to put up with.

Typical

[Anonymous Coward]

If she spent more time understand the spec that governs the code she is supposed to maintain and less time tending to her weeping vag on LKML it might not have been a problem.