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I purchased a USB3 PCIe card with the NEC (Renesas) uPD720201 chipset after reading many reports that the NEC chipsets have excellent support in Linux.

I have not been able to get it working at all. I purchased a second card with the same chipset, but it is also is not working.

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04 x86_64. Kernel is 3.2.0-75-generic (I also tried 3.13 kernel, but same problem) Motherboard is ASUS M4A785-M and Phenom II X4 965.

lspci -nn shows the card:

02:00.0 USB controller [0c03]: Renesas Technology Corp. uPD720201 USB 3.0 Host Controller [1912:0014] (rev 03)

But lsusb doesn't show any usb3 root hub. Nothing happens when I plug in any usb device.

The output of dmesg | grep xhci is interesting:

[    1.540238] xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17
[    1.540251] xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: setting latency timer to 64
[    1.540254] xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: xHCI Host Controller
[    1.540290] xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number8
[   20.437088] xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: can't setup
[   20.437090] xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: USB bus 8 deregistered
[   20.437182] xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: PCI INT A disabled
[   20.437183] xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: init 0000:02:00.0 fail, -110
[   20.437196] xhci_hcd: probe of 0000:02:00.0 failed with error -110

I've tried booting with/without USB devices plugged-in; no difference.

I've tried using a different power-supply connector (thinking I might have a bad connection).

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  • Kernel 3.2 is pretty old and I doubt you'll find stable USB3 for any chipset support on it. You need to upgrade your kernel or your whole Ubuntu release. Can you provide the output of the relevant line of lspci -nn so we can see the PCI device type ID?
    – David Foerster
    Feb 10, 2015 at 1:22
  • As I said above, I tried the 3.13 kernel (without upgrading the dist). I also tried booting Ubuntu 14.04 from a USB stick, with the same result. I added output of lspci -nn above.
    – phatpaul
    Feb 10, 2015 at 3:24

1 Answer 1

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That kernel is way too old. Initial usb 3 support was added to 2.6, but the real support for xhci was added in 4.4-4.6. It's part of the linux-firmware load as well as the kernel proper.

Keep in mind that you should attempt to upgrade the firmware first, http://www.station-drivers.com/index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=353&func=select&id=438&lang=en(via bootable windows emulation), then the kernel(preferably 4.6.3 at the time of this writing), http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/. If you've never upgraded a kernel before, it's very simple. 3 files(amd64 generic header & image & all.deb), one command(dpkg -i headers.deb image.deb), reboot, and you're done.

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  • Any new advice you can offer? I tried the firmware link included, but cant see anything relevant. AND do you mean I should update firmware on my PC, or for the USB3 PCIe board? I have updated the firmware for my PC to the latest available and done a ton of other research and tests. The system sees the board, but I can't use it ;-( . I"ll be happy to post a real Q if you can help Thanks for any ideas.
    – shellter
    Jun 25, 2019 at 15:48
  • OK, I found askubuntu.com/a/189986/332539 which seems to addres a lot of the issues. The only concern now, is that the instructions include warnings about file system differences and "back up your data". Cripes! ;-!
    – shellter
    Jun 25, 2019 at 16:05

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