A while ago, I suddenly started getting extremely long boot times on my Dell XPS 13 9305 Laptop. This happened after a BIOS update through fwupd so I naturally tried rolling back to the previous BIOS and then running the repair utility when that didn’t work, with no results. It also seems to happen booting into any Live CD so this isn’t particular to Fedora, but Fedora is what I use so I’ll post here. When it finally boots I get any myriad of issues:
slow login time
slow start of any GTK application
agonizingly slow execution of some cli utilities (including sudo and dmesg)
apps are sometimes light theme despite my global dark theme
some widgets randomly don’t work
background services crashing
Probably other stuff I have forgotten too. But never all of these at once, it’s somehow different every time.
3002.662390] usb usb3-port3: attempt power cycle
[ 3003.041548] usb 3-3: new high-speed USB device number 127 using xhci_hcd
[ 3007.842995] usb 3-3: device descriptor read/8, error -71
[ 3007.963563] usb 3-3: device descriptor read/8, error -71
[ 3008.384643] usb 3-3: new high-speed USB device number 2 using xhci_hcd
[ 3013.187997] usb 3-3: device descriptor read/8, error -71
[ 3013.305366] usb 3-3: device descriptor read/8, error -71
[ 3013.406134] usb usb3-port3: unable to enumerate USB device
[ 3013.624754] usb 3-3: new high-speed USB device number 3 using xhci_hcd
[ 3018.889868] usb 3-3: device descriptor read/64, error -71
[ 3024.009941] usb 3-3: device descriptor read/64, error -71
[ 3024.229929] usb 3-3: new high-speed USB device number 4 using xhci_hcd
[ 3029.495024] usb 3-3: device descriptor read/64, error -71
[ 3034.609260] usb 3-3: device descriptor read/64, error -71
That looks to me to be a firmware/hardware issue with USB.
Given it’s talking about power cycle it could be a device that is plugger in is using too much power, but that’s a guess.
What devices are plugged into the USB ports?
If you unplug them all do the messages stop?
This laptop charges from the USB ports, so I thought it could possibly be relevant. I’m booting from a USB thumbdrive, and I’ve tried multiple thumbdrives and each port on the laptop. Though, to be clear, I get the same errors when I boot into the Fedora installation with no USB ports occupied.
I looked at a probe for this model in the LHDB. The Tiger Lake-LP Thunderbolt 4 USB Controller and Tiger Lake-LP USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 xHCI Host Controller both use xhci_hcd. If the problem occurs with no USB/Thunderbolt ports connected, you may have bad firmware or a hardware fault. Dell has diagnostic software, but “The diagnostic application works only on PCs running Windows 10 or higher”.
I installed Windows 10 and ran this diagnostic software, only for every test to come back positive… While I was at it I updated all of the firmware, but still no improvement. I discovered that there’s a built in diagnostic in the BIOS, so I ran an ‘advanced’ scan with no issues found from that either. Oddly, I didn’t have any technical issues whatsoever installing or running Windows. I tried a couple other distros to make sure it wasn’t only Fedora, same issues there. Totally confused now, it seems like it must be a hardware or BIOS error but both diagnostic tools tell me it’s ok.
Next step is to check kernel configuration and module options related to the Tiger Lake-LP USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 xHCI Host Controller and the xhci_hcd module: Kernel.org Thunderbolt. You can see the small number (5 of 203!) of Linux systems where this controller works at LHDB. Have you tried Debian 12? A couple working systems are Framework, so worth checking the Framework forums.