Linux USB Troubleshooting – Why is USB Not Working in Linux When It Works in UEFI/BIOS?

For background I have just built a new machine with modern hardware including:

• AMD FX-8350
• Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3 motherboard
• 16GB RAM
• NVidia GTX 650 Ti
• Kingston SSD

Given that, I tried to install various versions of Linux on the SSD and was met with failure almost every time. I tried installing Arch, Debian stable, Debian sid, and Ubuntu 12.10 from a USB thumb drive but while the BIOS saw the USB drive and started to boot from it, as soon as the OS attempted to enumerate the USB devices I lost all USB functionality (including the boot device).

Eventually I burned a DVD and installed Ubuntu 12.10 onto the SSD. It should be noted that my USB keyboard (and mouse) work fine while in the American Megatrends UEFI/BIOS. Even when I'm in the pre-installation menus on the Live Ubuntu DVD the keyboard works fine.

As soon as Linux is booted (either Live DVD or from the SSD) I lose all USB functionality and can only navigate the OS using a PS/2 keyboard.

What I see in the dmesg/syslog is a few lines about "failed to load microcode amd_ucode/microcode_amd_fam15h.bin" and I can see USB devices failing to initialize.

If I do an lsusb I can see all the USB host controllers but none of the devices. Doing an lspci shows me all the hardware I'd expect. And doing an lsmod I do not see any usb modules loaded (usb_ehci for example).

I tried passing noapic to the kernel boot string and it had no effect on this problem.

The motherboard supports USB 3.0 but all the devices I have plugged into normal USB 2.0 ports.

I'm rather baffled at what could be killing/preventing USB (and my on-board network card) from working in Linux. There doesn't seem to be any problem with any of these devices working in BIOS and I do not have a Windows installation available to test and see if it works.

I've already RMA'd the motherboard once but the second one has exactly the same behavior so I think I can safely rule out hardware failure (since the behavior is identical, I don't think the odd of me getting two identically defective boards are greater than the odds of this being a Linux problem).

What else can I try to get USB (and ideally my network, but we'll stick to USB for now) working?

Edit #1:

Since I have no networking I can only relate interesting bits from dmesg here.

Of interest in dmesg I can see I have 11 USB host controllers (OHCI, EHCI, and xHCI). It detects my USB devices and then fails immediately as follows:

usb 3-1: new high-speed USB device number 2 using ehci_hcd
usb 3-1: device descriptor read/64, error -32

That repeats several times incrementing the number and trying other USB Host controllers until it falls back to OHCI controllers which also fail but have an additional message:

usb 8-1: device not accepting address 4, error -32

I think my networking problems have to do with the fact that I don't have IPv6 enabled on my router and that seems to be a problem

eth1: no IPv6 routers present

Edit #2:

lspci -vvv shows that my network adapters (both onboard and expansion) are Realtek Semiconductor (no surprise); RTL8111/8168B and RTL8169/8110 respectively. My USB controllers are Etron Technology EJ168 (xHCI) and AMD nee ATI SB7x0/SB8x0/SB9x0 (EHCI & OHCI)

Now running Debian wheezy modprobe shows usb_common, usbcore, xhci_hcd, ehci_hcd, and ohci_hcd all loaded and functioning.