Bug: XHCI (usb 3.0) issues

As we work to stabilize Haiku and move closer to the R1 beta releases, USB driver issues are becomming more apparent.

At the moment, bugs with our XHCI (usb 3.0) stack are high on the problem list. New hardware is beginning to ship with XHCI-only controllers, which means we can no-longer fall back to our stable EHCI (usb 2.0) stack.

A large number of bug reports have been opened around these kinds of issues:

These XHCI bugs frequenctly result in the following issues on real hardware:

Problems booting from USB drives

Crashes transferring data over the USB bus

Crashes and kernel panics at boot while Haiku examines the XHCI bus.

Work-arounds can be easy (booting from non-USB media), or extremely difficult. New users checking out Haiku will likely encounter these bugs, and may get a bad first-impression of Haiku.

Call to help

If you knowledgeable in low-level USB hardware (or have developed USB drivers for other other operating systems such as FreeBSD or Linux), we really could use a hand in reducing the overall number of XHCI-related bugs.

Solving just few of these issues will help propel Haiku to our first R1 release and beyond.

Resources