Trying to breathe some extra life into my computer now that we’re past the windows 10 EoL and I’m trying to install Mint

So far everything seems to be working fine except that some of my USB ports don’t seem to be working.

They work in Windows, they work in the BIOS but once I’m up and running in with some of them just stop.

My motherboard is a gigabyte ga-990fxa-u3 (Rev 4.0) running the latest bios version

It has some USB 3.0 ports, and some 2.2, I’m not home right now to double check but I believe it’s the 2.2 ports that aren’t working.

I played around with Linux a little bit well over a decade ago but I’m essentially a total Linux noob

Anyone got any thoughts about what’s going on with these ports or how to fix it?

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    There’s a few different ways for you to probe for info on your USB devices:

    lsusb - lists pretty much everything usb related, including root hubs on your motherboard

    For a more readable lsusb output you can lsusb -v | grep -E '\<(Bus|iProduct|bDeviceClass|bDeviceProtocol)' 2>/dev/null in my experience it can be helpful to slap a sudo on the beginning as well because sometimes certain devices can’t be polled without root privileges.

    usb-devices - similar to lsusb but produces much more detailed information

    find /sys/bus/usb/devices/usb*/ -name dev - produces a list of where the system saves information on usb devices. Each of the listed folders will hold a lot of files with a wealth of information on each usb device, but be very careful and do not edit these files.

    You can also do this to see what the system is doing in the background and then try plugging and unplugging devices from the offending usb ports:

    watch "dmesg | tail -20"

    You’ll at least be able to see if the system is registering anything at all when trying to use those ports, or if it’s as though the system doesn’t see them at all.

    I have a similar issue on my Lenovo ThinkBook but the ports don’t work in any OS despite being enabled in the UEFI. I still haven’t figured out what is wrong with them, but it seems they may just be toast. Thankfully the USB-C ports still work and I can just connect a hub to one of those.

  • henfredemars@lemdro.idEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    I had this problem specifically dealing with the way that IOMMU maps devices conflicting with a really old USB root hub. I had to set something like intel_iommu=off for my case.

    Would you be willing to share the output of your dmesg ?

    • Fondots@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      1 month ago

      My google-fu definitely seems to be pointing to it being a IOMMU issue.

      Not currently home with the computer, I’ll play with a couple settings when I get in and if it doesn’t get me anywhere I’ll definitely share that output

      • henfredemars@lemdro.idEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        Sounds good! Basically, the problem I had boiled down to a super old driver no kernel dev wants to touch with a ten foot pole and they’re just kinda hoping it’ll die a death to irrelevancy, but there are a few systems out there that do still use it.

        The rest of the design moved on to more advanced architecture.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 month ago

    Open your machine and look at these ports.

    Are they directly connected to the motherboard, or on the front of a case extended by a cable?

    • Fondots@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      1 month ago

      They’re directly on the motherboard

      The ones on the front of the case are working, and I’m 99% sure they’re connected to a 3.0 header

      I’m not currently home so not able to confirm that right now

  • your_paranoid_neighbour@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    0·
    1 month ago

    Had the same problem ages ago, as the other said, iommu 100%. iommu=pt on the kernel variables at grub or systemd-boot, and you’re ready to go!

    Edit: fx6300 on an 990x gaming, from gigabyte too, at the time.

    • Fondots@lemmy.worldOP
      0·
      1 month ago

      I put a more detailed explanation of what I did up in the original post, but I ended up needing to turn iommu on

      Which sort of flipped things around so that the 3.0 ports no longer worked but the 2.0 ones did

      And I had to make a small edit to get/default/grub

      Thank you for your help!

    • f4f4f4f4f4f4f4f4@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      My family still runs two of this mobo, but older revisions. I remember hearing about bugs with IOMMU but I can’t recall any USB or other problems.

      IOMMU can be disabled in BIOS; it seems that it would only be useful if passing devices through to a virtual machine? Is that a valid assessment?

      • potatoguy@lemmy.eco.br
        0·
        1 month ago

        Yeah, it seems its used for passing devices to virtualized environments, but it seems, on these old bulldozer motherboards, the usb devices are virtualized (I have read a long time ago, could be wrong).