Linux – USB 3.0 ports not working

driverslinuxusb

I have a Sager NP8130 notebook with two USB 3.0 ports which I cannot get to work in any linux distros I've tried. The distros I've tried so far are the latest 64-bit (where available) versions of the following:

  • Ubuntu
  • Mint
  • OpenSUSE
  • Crunchbang
  • Arch

In each distro I tested the port with two devices, a USB 3.0 Super Talent 8GB Express DUO flash drive and a USB 2.0 Logitech optical mouse. When I plug the flash drive in it will light up, signaling it is receiving power from the port but the drive does not attempt to mount. When I plug the mouse in the optical laser does not light up and it appears to be completely nonfunctional. In each case I also plugged both devices into a USB 2.0 port which worked as expected.

It should be noted that both USB 3.0 ports work fine in the Windows 7 OS that came with the laptop, with Windows even telling me my device could perform faster when I plug the flash drive into a USB 2.0 port but not giving me such a message when I use the 3.0 ports.

Research on Google says that USB 3.0 support should have been in the Linux kernel since about 2009, so I'm thinking this isn't an issue with any particular distribution. I've heard other reports of USB 3.0 working fine, so my amateur suspicion is that it's not a protocol support issue as much as it's likely a driver issue.

I'm not sure what commands will produce any relevant diagnosis information, but if anyone would like me to copy/paste the results of any commands just let me know in a comment and I'll update the question.

Thanks

Best Answer

It might be that the driver for the chip that's running the USB 3.0 ports isn't compiled into kernel. You can check the chipset information using lspci command:

$ /usr/sbin/lspci  |grep -i usb
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 02)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 02)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)

Then check kernel configuration whether the USB 3.0 driver is indeed enabled...

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