Freeze during Boot if Passive USB Hub is Connected

Community Support
1

Hi all,

I have a bit of a strange problem. I use my laptop with an egpu on one thunderbolt controller and a powered thunderbolt 4 dock on the other. But if I plug a specific usb 3 hub into the thunderbolt dock, the system will not boot. The weirdest part,unplugging the hub from the dock when it’s locked up will unfreeze it. The specific USB hub is unpowered, it’s just two USB A 3.0 ports and two USB C 3.2 ports. I’ve never had a problem with it after boot time.

Are there any bios settings I could try to ignore the hub at boot, or something in windows or linux I can use to check for shorts/strange behavior?

  • OS: OS independent problem, Arch Linux kernel 6.x or Windows 10
  • Laptop: i5-1135g7, 2x16GB 3200MHz, WD_BLACK SN750 2TB
  • Secure boot is disabled
  • Boot devices are the windows boot manager or GRUB

DMESG on hub connect:

[13639.270896] usb 2-1.3: new SuperSpeed Plus Gen 2x1 USB device number 6 using xhci_hcd
[13639.286649] usb 2-1.3: New USB device found, idVendor=05e3, idProduct=0625, bcdDevice=94.91
[13639.286660] usb 2-1.3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[13639.286663] usb 2-1.3: Product: USB3.2 Hub
[13639.286666] usb 2-1.3: Manufacturer: GenesysLogic
[13639.287859] hub 2-1.3:1.0: USB hub found
[13639.288416] hub 2-1.3:1.0: 4 ports detected
[13639.503582] usb 3-1.3: new high-speed USB device number 22 using xhci_hcd
[13639.595906] usb 3-1.3: New USB device found, idVendor=05e3, idProduct=0610, bcdDevice=94.91
[13639.595915] usb 3-1.3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[13639.595918] usb 3-1.3: Product: USB2.1 Hub
[13639.595920] usb 3-1.3: Manufacturer: GenesysLogic
[13639.597871] hub 3-1.3:1.0: USB hub found
[13639.598241] hub 3-1.3:1.0: 4 ports detected
2

Have you tried disabling the Boot from USB setting?

1 Like
3

That worked. Not sure why it would be scanning a passive USB hub without storage for boot devices though.

1 Like
4

Glad @yessikg 's suggestion worked.

I have seen that happen to laptops and even some desktop computers over the years. It is rooted in the fact that the BIOS scans peripherals upon initialization of the system before boot;

In your case it talks to the hub and says what device are you and expects a base set of answers; the code was generally not written with timeouts to move on to the next device because devices could take a long time to initialize (Like old SCSI devices with staggered startups) so it just hangs wherever it is in the list of devices it is scanning.

This coupled with the fact that not every vendor who puts together a USB hub follows all the standards; just enough to get it mostly working. :person_facepalming:

1 Like