Arch Linux

Harey

Member

From: Bavaria, Germany

Registered: 2007-03-24

Posts: 359

powertop --auto-tune and kernel 4.13.x lead to USB devices not respond

Hello @ all,

I have a fanless/headless home server running arch x86_64 with testing repos enabled. Its system partitions are on an USB stick, the builtin harddisk only serves as data storage. This is made to enable harddisk spindown and save power due to 24/7 operation. To save even more power I installed powertop as a systemd service as suggested by the wiki. This has been running very well for quite some time now.

When upgrading to kernel 4.13 the setup stopped working. During boot process, after grub starts the initramfs the system disk could not be found. I could not find out why and downgraded to kernel 4.12 which fixed the situation.

While fiddling with another system that had no (USB) keyboard and mouse anymore after the upgrade to 4.13 I found out that both systems were running the powertop --auto-tune systemd service. Well, what should I say: disable it and all is running well. I guess USB autosuspend is the culprit in both cases.

I am still int the process of finding out what causes this behavior but thought I post this, maybe to save some other people time.

Greetings
Harvey

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Linux is like a wigwam: No Gates, no Windows and an Apache inside