Linux 6.13-rc4 To Fix A Nasty USB Problem Plaguing The Kernel For A Few Weeks

Merged to Linux Git minutes ago and ahead of the Linux 6.13-rc4 tagging on Sunday were this week’s set of USB fixes that are particularly noteworthy. Most significant is fixing a USB regression that had been present in the stack since the Linux 6.13 merge window last month.

Greg Kroah-Hartman commented in today’s USB / Thunderbolt fixes for 6.13-rc4:

“Much reported xhci bugfix for usb-storage devices (and other devices as well, tripped me up on a video camera)”

This originated from a bug report noting that when trying to make an EXT4 file-system on a USB microSD card it would result in hanging the entire system. Ouch.

There were other USB bug reports in recent weeks as well from those testing early versions of the Linux 6.13 kernel.

The issue was tracked back to a set of XHCI clean-ups, fixes, and code refactoring for the USB code in Linux 6.13… In the end the fix was to correct the arguments passed to the XHCI ring expansion call… The source and destination rings were accidentally passed in the wrong order in the reworked code for Linux 6.13. Whoops.

The USB fixes are now merged ahead of Linux 6.13-rc4 releasing on Sunday. This pull request also adds Thunderbolt support for Intel Panther Lake P and Panther Lake M SoCs with just needing new device IDs. On the Thunderbolt side is also an improvement to the redrive mode handling.