[SOLVED]Kernel Issues...LM17.3+USB HDD not powering off

[Arch_Enemy]

Jot sure where to put this so I guess I put it in hardware, although it seems to be a kernel issue...

It is now 5:30AM EST on the third day of reinstalling LM 17.3. I decided I like it better then 19. If my typing is off it's because I'm operating on my 3rd Old Fashioned and the keyboard is a blur.

I reinstalled Mint 17.3 just because it ran so well...well...

Talk about an Arch moment. I discovered the drives I store my photos on were having issues. I have 3 drives I keep photos on; two of them are USB drives, using USB 3. Now, I am running an older MB with a Xeon CPU. After a lot of searching I found an older USB I made with Mint 17.3 and found the kernel I was using was 4.4.0-121. It works flawlessly.

When I rebuilt the 17.3 system I decided to go with the 4.4.139 kernel. Hey, the latest is the best, right?

What's happening is the drives appear just fine, but when I remove them they crash the system. I reverted to an older kernel and I had the issue of them trying to remount. As I said, I found an older stick and (finally) realized it was running 4.4.0-121. When I installed this kernel and removed the other, lo and behold my USB drives behaved themselves finally.

The board has a Renesas Electronics* USB 3.0 chip. I have had issues with the stock 3.19 kernel that came with it; I can't remember which kernel was the first one that worked properly but I can verify 4.4.121 works ok.

So, with whom do I lodge a complaint? It's now almost 6AM, my system is working again , I've had enough to drink and going to bed. Cheers...

/rant

[Arch_Enemy]

BTW, I know about the dangers of randomly installing kernels, but I figured if 4.4.139 was in the distro, it must be good, right?...

[michael louwe]

When I rebuilt the 17.3 system I decided to go with the 4.4.139 kernel. Hey, the latest is the best, right?

What's happening is the drives appear just fine, but when I remove them they crash the system. I reverted to an older kernel and I had the issue of them trying to remount. As I said, I found an older stick and (finally) realized it was running 4.4.0-121. When I installed this kernel and removed the other, lo and behold my USB drives behaved themselves finally.

.
I think Linux kernel 4.4.139 has the Meltdown & Spectre patches while 4.4.121 has not.

AFAIK, LM 17.3 does not support USB 3.0, like Win 7. Only LM 18.x or later supports USB 3.0[EDIT - my mistake, could be bc my LM 17.3 is using an older kernel)].

[Arch_Enemy]

When I rebuilt the 17.3 system I decided to go with the 4.4.139 kernel. Hey, the latest is the best, right?

What's happening is the drives appear just fine, but when I remove them they crash the system. I reverted to an older kernel and I had the issue of them trying to remount. As I said, I found an older stick and (finally) realized it was running 4.4.0-121. When I installed this kernel and removed the other, lo and behold my USB drives behaved themselves finally.

.
I think Linux kernel 4.4.139 has the Meltdown & Spectre patches while 4.4.121 has not.

AFAIK, LM 17.3 does not support USB 3.0, like Win 7. Only LM 18.x or later supports USB 3.0.

IIRC, 121 did have the patches. I kept upgrading every time a new patch was announced. And it does support USB3. Before I loaded 19 I ran 17.3 for four years, and it worked just fine. The only thing was, the "recommended" kernel series was 3.13 or 3.19, and every time you'd click "safely remove drive" it would shut the drive down, then immediately power it back up and mount it all over again. That's how I found 4.4.121 in the first place!


Edit: it has the patches for meltdown and spectre S1, but S2 is only covered by updating the microcode and firmware, which I always do. This machine is set up to do photo processing and I run 17.3 because I have some old software that no longer runs on 19 without borking the system from further upgrades. It usually only goes on line for plugins and system maintenance; I don't do a lot of surfing with it. Once I get it where I want it I won't do any further updates. I had the same installation running sweetly until I tried to force some software and loaded the C++6 libraries, which also caused it to not be upgradeable. <SIGH> Since it was working just fine that way I should have left it, but I couldn't install anything. Since then there have been changes made to the 17.3 repos that caused me a LOT of headaches. But that's a rant for another day. So far <knock-knock> everything is right with the world...

[Arch_Enemy]

We'll see what happens. Turns out 4.4.0-63 was the magic bullet.