Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 125832
SMP Kernel crash if USB mouse and keyboard
Last modified: 2015-01-04 17:06:52 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040608 Firefox/0.8.0+ Description of problem: Kernel crashes early during startup if USB mouse and keyboard are present. Crash only occurs with SMP kernel, not uniprocessor version of kernel. Crash does not occur if PS2 mouse/keyboard are used. However, the PS2 keyboard and mouse are unusable. I don't know how to catch the crash trace that occurs during startup. For fun removed the "rhgb quiet" from the kernel parameters in grub.conf - but that made no difference. After system has fully booted with PS2 mouse/keyboard, and even though those are dead, I can then plug in USB keyboard/mouse and they are recognized and work. It makes no difference whether the USB keyboard/mouse are directly attached or are via a USB hub. This is on a SuperMicro 6013P-i, Dual Xeon, 512M memory. Motherboard uses Intel 7501 The BIOS and the grub bootloader happily talk to the USB keyboard. It is only after the particular kernel is selected via grub and that kernel begins to boot do things go wrong. I've also let the boot go from power-up to crash without touching the keyboard/mouse. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.6.6.1-427smp How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Attach USB keyboard/mouse 2. Boot SMP kernel 3. Watch it die early in the boot process Additional info:
It may not be USB related at all - I have had the same failure now with the PS2 mouse/keyboard. And now it sometimes gets a traceback that begins: Badness in do_unblank_screen at drivers/char/vt.c:2857 The problem seems to have a degree of non-determinancy - now the machine never completes a boot with the SMP kernel no matter what mouse/keyboard are attached, but it comes up 100% of the time using older the uniprocessor kernel and older SMP kernels.
OK, more traces. Here's one from when there was no mouse/keyboard plugged into either the PS2 or USB ports. (Sorry about any typos - I'm rekeying from the screen) Call Trace: psmouse_interrupt+0x1c1/0x272 serio_interrupt+0x21/0x53 i8042_interrupt+0xf9/0x10a i8042_open+0x6c/0x9e serio_open+0xf/0x23 psmouse_connect+0xa9/0x1ff serio_find_dev+0x2f/0x49 serio_register_port+0x2e/0x40 i8042_port_register+0x57/0x5f i8042_init+0xde/0x148 do_initcalls+0x49/0x97 init+0x109/-x1e6 init+0x0/0x1e6 kernel_thread_helper+0x5/0xb Code: Bad EIP value <0>Kernel panic: Attempted to kill init!
More digging: The problem is directly tied to whether the BIOS has "Legacy USB Support" enabled or not. If enabled, the kernel crashes on the way up. If it's disabled then the kernel comes up happy. The reason that I have USB Legacy USB enabled is so that I can use a USB keyboard to talk to grub as the machine boots. I also use it to occassionally bootstrap a new system from USB thumb drives or a USB cdrom. (Without Legacy USB enabled, I can use the keyboard to talk to the bios, but grub doesn't seem to have the warewithall to find the keyboard unless Legacy USB is enabled.) My guess is that there is a handoff problem during initialization when the BIOS has set up "Legacy USB".
There are two sets of problems we know about Several very high end boxes have broken USB legacy support (which is a problem I'm looking at dealing with). Basically when we do our fancy mouse/keyboard probe the BIOS magic that does USB legacy on some boards is buggy and explodes in various ways The second problem is with EHCI bios handovers and is a real kernel bug Dell found which is now fixed upstream so should show up very soon.
I have a California Digital 9416 NAS box for which I experienced the same problem until disabling the Legacy USB as suggested by Karl. My BIOS is: Phoenix Technologies, LTD V1.03 05/15/2003
Fedora Core 2 has now reached end of life, and no further updates will be provided by Red Hat. The Fedora legacy project will be producing further kernel updates for security problems only. If this bug has not been fixed in the latest Fedora Core 2 update kernel, please try to reproduce it under Fedora Core 3, and reopen if necessary, changing the product version accordingly. Thank you.