On Fedora 40, with FW 13 AMD, I have installed the USB-A expansion card on the left, the slot near the front (as advised, the port on the back supporting USB4 will consume more power).
After some time not using the port, if I plus an USB2 device (USB key, 4G modem), the device will not power up at all and will not be registered by the computer. It is as if the power pins do not provide the required 5V on that port.
However, if I take away the expansion card and put it back, then the USB2 device starts working again.
I suspect that there is something that puts the connector to sleep after some time not in use, to avoid drawing too much current. However, it does not correctly come back from sleep. Is this a known issue?
This sounds like an issue i’ve faced on linux with powertop before. I think fedora uses like a power-profiles-daemon or TLP or something, but you can usually configure USB auto-suspend from inside the operating system. I would double check your services to see if powertop or tlp is running and then go to the arch wiki and see what the process is for disabling usb auto-suspend on them (or fedoras documentation on the power-profiles-daemon)
Edit:namely, my guess is the USB waking isn’t extending to the other end of the usb c to USB a expansion card, meaning that once the expansion chip goes to sleep, it can’t wake up without being reattached. Idk if that’s really what’s happening, but it sounds plausible
I thought the front left USB A had died, I took it out and tried it elsewhere and it was fine, reseated it and it started up again, this was after several power cycles etc.
With FW 16 AMD and Ubuntu 24.04 the installed USB-A expeansion card on the left middle position sleeps most of the time.
This USB-A expeansion card is not to blame, because it works on alternative positions.
Therefore I replaced this USB-A expansion card on the left middle position by a simple (and cheap) connector, USB-C (internal) / USB-A (external). And now I have a working USB-A connector.
Summarizing, I suspect poor contact on the left middle USB-C (internal) position.
I’ve had this exact same issue since I bought the laptop, also on f40. Even opened a support case but it looked like it had resolved probably because I was reseating things to gather stuff for them.
Eventually just gave up and I’ve been using it as though the lower left usb module doesn’t exist. Reseating it will bring it to life every time, but that’s pretty involved when you just want to plug something in.
It’s definitely the port since I swapped USB modules between the right and left side, and whichever module is in the right will work always.
I think I’ll just have to order an USB-C expansion card instead of the USB-A adapter that definitely does not work, and carry with me the external adapters…
What bothers me is that I cannot see the USB-C to USB-A expansion card in lsusb or in /sys/bus/usb/devices. No device appears or disappears if I (un)plug the USB-A expansion card though it is working when I just plug it.
Because autosuspend is controlled per device in /sys/bus/usb/devices, I don’t know how to disable autosuspend for the expansion card.
My USB-A port also stopped working in some situations. I also thought it might be related to some powersaving stuff first, but I eventually resolved the problem by contacting support, which ended up by them sending me a new mainboard, which resolved the problem. I wrote a lot of details I learned during the debugging steps the support requested me to do in a post in this other thread about the same issue: [TRACKING] FW13 AMD USB-A expanson card powers down (?) and does not wake up - #27 by SuperTux88
This might help debugging and narrow down the problem, but if the USB-A port only causes problems on the left ports but work on the right, chances are, that you have the same issue and you should probably also create a support request about it.