Just got a new Lenovo Thinkpad X250 laptop last month, the first thing to do was to format the disk, got rid off Windows and installed Debian 8.1. The only extra thing I needed to do was to install the iwlwifi firmware, and everything just worked. Well, almost, since I haven’t had time to play with the fingerprint scanner yet.
Over the course of the month, I ran apt-get upgrade twice, for security update. Everything seemed ok, until today, when I inserted an SD card to look up something. Nothing came up. I looked at the system log, not even a single event. It was as if the card reader never detected any insertion.
I took a look at the hardware status, sudo lspci -v showed:
02:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS5227 PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01)
Subsystem: Lenovo Device 2226
Flags: fast devsel, IRQ 16
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 SubstatesHmm, it looked like the module is not even loaded. What’s up? Let’s take a look at dmesg:
[ 1.315456] usbcore: registered new interface driver hub
[ 1.315520] rtsx_pci 0000:02:00.0: irq 56 for MSI/MSI-X
[ 1.315546] rtsx_pci 0000:02:00.0: rtsx_pci_acquire_irq: pcr->msi_en = 1, pci->irq = 56
[ 1.315687] thermal LNXTHERM:00: registered as thermal_zone0
[ 1.315690] ACPI: Thermal Zone [THM0] (45 C)
[ 1.315884] pps_core: LinuxPPS API ver. 1 registered
[ 1.315885] pps_core: Software ver. 5.3.6 - Copyright 2005-2007 Rodolfo Giometti <giometti@linux.it>
[ 1.316046] PTP clock support registered
[ 1.317042] e1000e: Intel(R) PRO/1000 Network Driver - 2.3.2-k
[ 1.317045] e1000e: Copyright(c) 1999 - 2014 Intel Corporation.
[ 1.317176] e1000e 0000:00:19.0: Interrupt Throttling Rate (ints/sec) set to dynamic conservative mode
[ 1.317192] e1000e 0000:00:19.0: irq 57 for MSI/MSI-X
[ 1.317479] SCSI subsystem initialized
[ 1.317643] usbcore: registered new device driver usb
[ 1.318186] ehci_hcd: USB 2.0 'Enhanced' Host Controller (EHCI) Driver
[ 1.318398] ehci-pci: EHCI PCI platform driver
[ 1.319230] libata version 3.00 loaded.
[ 1.415653] rtsx_pci: probe of 0000:02:00.0 failed with error -110
[ 1.483569] e1000e 0000:00:19.0 eth0: registered PHC clockHmm, the module rtsx_pci failed to load, with error -110. This is funny, I’m very sure that the card reader was working flawlessly many times before, across multiple boot sessions. I have a couple of encrypted SD cards to store personal stuffs, and I had used them many times on this laptop. Something went wrong along one of the updates.
Browsing through the kernel bugzilla showed a few cases which had the same error code, and it seemed to be related to the msi_en option. Well, let’s try to work around by disabling that. We need to unload the module first, because of its half-baked state:
sudo modprobe -r rtsx_pciThen, load it again, with the option disabled:
sudo modprobe rtsx_pci msi_en=0Now, the system log showed:
[ 5234.004011] rtsx_pci 0000:02:00.0: rtsx_pci_acquire_irq: pcr->msi_en = 0, pci->irq = 16Ok, it seems to be loaded. Let’s look at the status again, the command sudo lspci -v showed:
02:00.0 Unassigned class [ff00]: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTS5227 PCI Express Card Reader (rev 01)
Subsystem: Lenovo Device 2226
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
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_pciNow, let’s insert an SD card into the slot, and look at system log, we got:
Aug 9 15:35:23 venus kernel: [ 5280.782622] mmc0: new high speed SDHC card at address aaaa
Aug 9 15:35:23 venus kernel: [ 5280.783923] mmcblk0: mmc0:aaaa SU08G 7.40 GiB
Aug 9 15:35:23 venus kernel: [ 5280.797583] mmcblk0: p1 p2Bingo, now the card has been detected, and devices are created properly. All we have to do is to mount it.
To keep the module option across reboot sessions, create a file /etc/modprobe.d/rtsx_pci.conf and add the following line:
options rtsx_pci msi_en=0Rebooted and it still worked!