[ILUG] thoughts on vendors entries

[Bryan O'Donoghue]

> Advice sought: when I turned on my second-best laptop today it said
> =========================================
> Jul 14 11:17:41 martha kernel: hub 1-0:1.0: over-current change on port 1
> Jul 14 11:18:12 martha last message repeated 121 times
> Jul 14 11:19:13 martha last message repeated 244 times
> =========================================
> and so on.
> 
> What sort of error message is that?
> There should be a competition for the most useless error message,
> or the most obscure.

Disclaimer : ianaue : i am not a usb expert.

Having consulted with the great cake, unless I'm wrong here...

This is either a kernel or a hardware bug.

Your USB port 1, reports an over current "change" state, then the port
is told to clear this "feature" (I'm not sure if that is analogous to
switching it 'off forever' or just clearing it 'right now'). ie if
"clear feature"="switch off forever" in this domain, is not immediately
obvious to me.

In any case, either the clear command fails due to a software bug or
hardware bug, or the clear command succeeds, but for whatever reason,
the condition gets reasserted.

To find out for sure, remove whatever is in port 1.
Reboot.

If the error persists, upgrade to the latest vanilla kernel.
If the error still persists... perhaps try out a 2.4...

If at that point the error still persists (sans misbehaving device in
port 1 for all previous cases) ... then it _does_ probably mean that for
whatever reason USB port 1, on your laptop, reports over-current change
for no good reason... and is probably broken, somehow... due to, black
magic... or a field effect/martians maybe.