SD card reader not detected on Lenovo ThinkPad L530, RTS5229

Question

The SD card reader on my new L530 is not working.

Please let me know what diagnostics I can provide to help fix this.

Answer 1

Here's the English translation of Christian's solution

Answer 2

The drivers from Realtek website can be easily compiled but only with 3.x kernels.

For newer 4.x kernels I've fixed several errors and created a repository on github.

https://github.com/gexplorer/RTS5209-linux-driver

Answer 3

On Lenovo Thinkpad, L460 similar problem was there with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. With the latest Firmware and Kernel update, the problem is gone now. Although I am still getting the following output as earlier-

$ sudo lspci -v
02:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS522A PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01)
Subsystem: Lenovo RTS522A PCI Express Card Reader
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 123
Memory at f1100000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=4K]
Capabilities: [40] Power Management version 3
Capabilities: [50] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
Capabilities: [70] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
Capabilities: [100] Advanced Error Reporting
Capabilities: [140] Device Serial Number 00-00-00-01-00-4c-e0-00
Capabilities: [150] Latency Tolerance Reporting
Capabilities: [158] L1 PM Substates
Kernel driver in use: rtsx_pci
Kernel modules: rtsx_pci

Answer 4

Translator's note

@Christian Zudeick's answer links to a German forum post by sanmiguel9; below is a hopefully-faithful translation of that post. Links in the original that led to dead or German pages have been kept intact, and are followed by links to probably-equivalent living or English pages, respectively. Your translator is not a native speaker of German, and apologizes in advance for all nuances of meaning, humour, and colloquiality they have failed to convey. Omnis traductor traditor.

Bibliographical data of the original:

• URL: https://forum.ubuntuusers.de/topic/unbekannter-realtek-sd-kartenleser-einrichten-/
• author: sanmiguel9
• date: 2012-08-23 00:39
• forum: forum.ubuntuusers.de
• Ubuntu version: Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin)

Hello,

I have just discovered, to my horror, that my new Lenovo Edge E530 laptop does not read SD cards. A firm

lspci

in the Terminal produces the following line:

02:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. Device 5229 (rev 01)

Entering this into my favourite rainforest-protecting search engine ecosia.org leads me to the appropriate Realtek download page [strikethrough added in translation, see end of paragraph —transl.]. That says "PCIE RTS5229 card reader driver for Linux," whew, now that looks pretty promising 👍🙂
[That link gives '404 not found'. Searching for "realtek RTS5229" yields this download page, which also has a link called "PCIE RTS5229 card reader driver for Linux" —transl.]

Download the driver as a zipfile, unpack twice and change to the appropriate folder in the terminal.

cd rts5229

As the README-file explains, the next step is to run the

make

command. This is theoretically followed by a

sudo make install

I'm a bit old-fashioned, though, and instead of this command I prefer to use checkinstall [English equivalent —transl.] with

sudo checkinstall

After the deb-package is successfully built and installed there follows a

depmod

Additionally, in my case I suspect a manual load of the new Kernel module rts5229 with

sudo modprobe rts5229

was necessary to wake my SD card reader from its Sleeping Beauty slumbers.

--> ahhh, Linux can be sooo nice 😁

End of translation of sanmiguel9's post. All credit belongs to them; responsibility for the translation and the alternative links is mine.

Answer 5

it's a 'Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS5229 PCI Express Card'

Solution in German (i think you'll get the point) and translated to English.

Answer 6

I have a package to supply this driver for Ubuntu Precise, in ppa:jamesf/lenovofixes.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:jamesf/lenovofixes
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install rts-5229-dkms

The package is source for a kernel module to enable the hardware. It is in DKMS format. This package includes a udev rule to make automounting work properly.

(I have been working on enabling these Lenovo systems for Canonical/Lenovo. The driver source for this is not formally released by Realtek and can't yet be used upstream, and so unfortunately it's not going to find its way into the upstream Linux kernel or Ubuntu kernels in the near future. In the meantime, there's this.)

While you're at it, you may want to try the micmute package from that ppa - if your mic mute hard button is misbehaving.