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2008-05-05: Linux and USB
This is a real topic for the international level: USB and the Linux kernel. In my german blog I told the people about my new PC. After some time I discovered strange USB problems and filed a Debian bug report. Strange things were happening with kernel 2.6.24: during fsck of USB disk devices the whole USB system dies. With newer kernels (2.6.25-tree) the USB system got a bit better. At least the USB system doesn't die. But the strangeness was staying. When I run a vmstat 1 during a fsck it looks like: Starting with USB 2 and after some times it falls down to lower USB 1 speed. This can be proven after the fsck by doing speed tests with the USB device and the speed was limited at about 1 MB/s. Another strange thing was showing up: my USB TV card wasn't able to play anymore. When I put it into one of my USB ports or at a hub the whole USB bus will be resetted, and the external USB disks too. This is very bad when they had been mounted before. So I was asking myself: is it a kernel bug? Is it a bug coming from the motherboard?
First of all I'm telling about the Motherboard. It's a Gigabyte model named "GA-MA790FX-DQ6" and because of the use of an AMD Phenom CPU I was ugrading the firmware first to the highest possible BIOS version: F4. In fact this changed nothing, the problems stayed the same. I also have to tell that this board has 6 USB ports to the outside world of my PC. When I'm starting the kernel it finds 6 USB controller, 5 OHCI and one EHCI. In the past there was a fact I never understood: you cannot use the EHCI controller (the fast USB2 stuff) without having at least one OHCI or UHCI USB module loaded. But I read that there are boards which might run the EHCI stuff without OHCI. In the BIOS it's clear: when I'm disabling USB1-ports I'm unable to switch on USB2. They are connected and I can only enable USB2 with USB1 enabled too. So I thought, this idea doesn't belong to me. But I tried it nevertheless and by removing the ohci modules I found:
The USB disks will be fsck'ed fast!
The USB TV card runs without any problem!
Before this I thought it's a problem with IRQ sharing. It might be something like this, but the fun part is: by removing the OHCI modules the EHCI is only sharing its interrupt with the embedded sound card. And even by playing music and using USB disks or the USB TV card everything works fine. I think this is an important hint for all of you which are using this kind of board or even other boards:
Don't use OHCI and EHCI together, just use one of them!
I don't know why there are so many controllers at this board when every outside port is connected to all of them. But that's not a new situation, I've seen this very often in the past...
Anyway: this is also a hint to Gigabyte, because if the BIOS would have the function to disable just the USB1 parts (who needs it anyway?) and having USB2 enabled I wouldn't have to swim in a sea of pain the last week. Now it's a bit bad: Because I don't want to load the OHCI stuff at boot time I removed the drivers by hand from the initrd image. Maybe there's a kernel option for not loading the OHCI modules? Right now I cannot find something like such an option (tell me about it), and it was a big pain in my ass living without a working USB system. People told me that USB is not critical or severe. I must say: for anyone using Linux desktops this technology is a must. So many devices are running with USB, I guess I'm not the only one saying that a system without USB is not usable. It's one of the most important buses now, for desktops much more important than PCI.
Anyway, I got around the problem and I hope I can help someone with it by blogging this. BTW: this motherboard rocks! :)

2008-01-21: News, News, News!
You're absolutely right, I'm neglecting you international folks the last months. I hope this will get better now. First: happy new year to all of you! So many things happened. There was the 24th Chaos Communication Congress 2007 (24C3) here in Berlin at the end of the year (like every year). It was very good, if you missed it, I really feel sorry for you.
The next thing happened was: I bought an UWPs EEE PC Gallery ASUS EEE-PC in Taiwan because ASUS was not able to put this nice little laptop in our shops before Christmas. Worst marketing I've ever seen. However, you might also notice that my advertizing stuff got less after the problems with Google. You remember: they kicked me off just for my domain-names. A very american censorship, maybe they beep their ads if the domains contain "bad words". I thought a lot about this and a friend told me about shirtshops in the internet. You upload your designs and add some profit to the item and those companies are doing all the work: printing, selling and shipping. This looks quite good so I decided to do my very own and here it is:
shop.big-asses.de
Of course this one is for the great majority of US klicks at my page, so the money is just the Dollar. But there are also other possibilities:
ukshop.big-asses.de, the british version, you can pay directly in Pound Sterling
japanshop.big-asses.de, the japanese version, paying in japanese Yen
espshop.big-asses.de, the spanish version, here the money's still the Euro
Of course, if you're coming from another contry you can change the language and the origin yourself. There's a button at the upper right side to change country and language. I just made those 3 subdomains for those ones which are the "bigger visitors" here. I hope you like the items of the shop and maybe buy them (BUY! BUY! BUY! NOW! :)))).

2007-12-25: Merry Xmas to all of you out there!

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL OF YOU!

And maybe one of you will come to the Chaos Communication Congress here in Berlin? It's one of the most important events of the IT community in Europe! And: most of the tracks are in english language! C'mon, spend your end of the year here in Berlin and come to the Congress! :)
And by the way: did you see my T-Shirt-Shop yet? The pages can also be switched to english and you can buy there worldwide!

2007-11-01: One last thing to say after Halloween...

I HAD TO DO IT! YES!
Do you need the image in full size? Just click this link!

2007-10-31: Happy Halloween!

Ok, it maybe last year's image. But I couldn't do better this year, sorry. Maybe next year? :)

2007-10-23: New Gallery: Festival Of Lights 2007
For those of you who don't know what the "Festival Of Lights" is about I can really recommend to travel to Berlin! The festival itself is running since a week and will end next week-end. Hurry-up! Don't miss it! To get an idea, what it's all about, try my new page:
festivaloflights.big-asses.de
I'll also try to add more stuff on that page when I'm shooting more pictures like this. Or try my Fotothing page:

Enjoy!

2007-08-30: New Gallery: Lanzarote 2007!
We've been at the Canarian island of Lanzarote in the beginning of this year. I took thousands of pictures and always wanted to show them at my Gallery-Pages, but never had the time to sort them out or do captions for the images. Ok, the captions are German but I think the images speak for themself in any language. If you want to take a look, try this link! Enjoy! If you have any feedback, don't hesitate to tell me!

2007-08-04: 24h Shopping in Berlin!
Yes, we got it now! Shopping-spree US-style! We have the first supermarket which starts opening on monday 8am and closes at saturday, 11pm. Yes, that's right: it's open the whole week, except sundays. Sunday is an official holiday and stores will stay closed, but hey: as long as the rest of the week is free for shopping, who cares? You don't believe me? Here are the poster-ads of this store:

That's heavy for this country, hm? BTW, lots of other supermarkets also open now until 10pm on weekdays. I think that's the way to relax and shop. Before I always connected shopping with rushing and badging, no time for breathing, run, run, run. Mostly it was too late and lots of stores had been closed. This will not happen to me again, I love it! Oh, I forgot the address:
Reichelt
Berliner Str. 24
10715 Berlin (Wilmersdorf)
That's the Google-Maps-Link to the store. I think lots of Berlin-tourists might think, it's a good idea to go there. :)
One last addition: If you go shopping between 10pm and 6am, you'll get a free coffee for staying awake during your shopping spree! :)
And if that's not enough Berlin-shopping-feeling, try the Mermgfurt-T-Shirt! If you don't know what "Mermgfurt" means, try this. And if you want to support our movement, you should go here to buy it. Have fun, amigos!

2007-06-09: New Gallery: WGT 2007 and some nice Canon-Camera ehancements
Yes, gals'n'guys, the lazy blogger is writing some sentences in english again. Strange but true.
First I want to tell about a new gallery in my photo area. I've been at the WGT (Wave-Gotik-Treffen) in Leipzig 2 weeks ago. This is an international dark festival and if you wasn't there, I can tell: You really missed a big thing! There have been lots of bands and concerts, nice and beautiful people and the possibility of shopping: everything a dark heart loves. Maybe you decide to come next year, too? WGT 2007 Gallery Here you can find my pictures of the festival, enjoy! The texts are german as always, but I think an image is saying more than thousand words, hm? :)
And for those of you who own a digital Canon compact camera, I have some nice addons for you. Some russian guys developed a system for Canon cameras which you can boot from SD card. With this system you also have RAW images in those cameras, which you normally don't have. You can script your own stuff, the battery display is exact etc. They really did an amazing job, this I would recommend as a good starting point. And remember: you don't change anything in the camera, no firmware-update whatsoever. You pull the bootable SD card and the camera is in the original state, so you don't loose any guarantees. I gave it a try and I'm really impressed!

2007-05-14: Skynet???
I often think about those problems what can happen if a science fiction movie becomes reality. Mostly it's movies like Star Troopers, what's almost in our reality today, although the bugs are the terrorists. It could be that before we're going into space we might be kill ourselves. But there's another way. Remember the Terminator series where robots kill humans. Those robots got their commands from an IT-System, a big network computer. The name of this bastard was Skynet. And now reality is faster than fiction:
Skynet is alive!
And this is no funny idea of some conspiracy guys, it's the official name for an IT-System of the British Army which controls flying battle robots, which almost look like those in the Terminator movie! Is there a way to save this planet? And: where the hell is John Connor? Is he alive yet? Where's Sarah Connor? C'mon, let's go all out to the mentally ill clinics and search for her! We have to find her until it's too late! :)
A sad world, where the only humourous guys are those ones from the Army...
BTW, worst of all: what, if Hollywood wants to have license fees for using their names for military purposes? This is a copyright- and branding-violation...

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2008-05-05:	Linux and USB This is a real topic for the international level: USB and the Linux kernel. In my german blog I told the people about my new PC. After some time I discovered strange USB problems and filed a Debian bug report. Strange things were happening with kernel 2.6.24: during fsck of USB disk devices the whole USB system dies. With newer kernels (2.6.25-tree) the USB system got a bit better. At least the USB system doesn't die. But the strangeness was staying. When I run a vmstat 1 during a fsck it looks like: Starting with USB 2 and after some times it falls down to lower USB 1 speed. This can be proven after the fsck by doing speed tests with the USB device and the speed was limited at about 1 MB/s. Another strange thing was showing up: my USB TV card wasn't able to play anymore. When I put it into one of my USB ports or at a hub the whole USB bus will be resetted, and the external USB disks too. This is very bad when they had been mounted before. So I was asking myself: is it a kernel bug? Is it a bug coming from the motherboard? First of all I'm telling about the Motherboard. It's a Gigabyte model named "GA-MA790FX-DQ6" and because of the use of an AMD Phenom CPU I was ugrading the firmware first to the highest possible BIOS version: F4. In fact this changed nothing, the problems stayed the same. I also have to tell that this board has 6 USB ports to the outside world of my PC. When I'm starting the kernel it finds 6 USB controller, 5 OHCI and one EHCI. In the past there was a fact I never understood: you cannot use the EHCI controller (the fast USB2 stuff) without having at least one OHCI or UHCI USB module loaded. But I read that there are boards which might run the EHCI stuff without OHCI. In the BIOS it's clear: when I'm disabling USB1-ports I'm unable to switch on USB2. They are connected and I can only enable USB2 with USB1 enabled too. So I thought, this idea doesn't belong to me. But I tried it nevertheless and by removing the ohci modules I found: The USB disks will be fsck'ed fast! The USB TV card runs without any problem! Before this I thought it's a problem with IRQ sharing. It might be something like this, but the fun part is: by removing the OHCI modules the EHCI is only sharing its interrupt with the embedded sound card. And even by playing music and using USB disks or the USB TV card everything works fine. I think this is an important hint for all of you which are using this kind of board or even other boards: Don't use OHCI and EHCI together, just use one of them! I don't know why there are so many controllers at this board when every outside port is connected to all of them. But that's not a new situation, I've seen this very often in the past... Anyway: this is also a hint to Gigabyte, because if the BIOS would have the function to disable just the USB1 parts (who needs it anyway?) and having USB2 enabled I wouldn't have to swim in a sea of pain the last week. Now it's a bit bad: Because I don't want to load the OHCI stuff at boot time I removed the drivers by hand from the initrd image. Maybe there's a kernel option for not loading the OHCI modules? Right now I cannot find something like such an option (tell me about it), and it was a big pain in my ass living without a working USB system. People told me that USB is not critical or severe. I must say: for anyone using Linux desktops this technology is a must. So many devices are running with USB, I guess I'm not the only one saying that a system without USB is not usable. It's one of the most important buses now, for desktops much more important than PCI. Anyway, I got around the problem and I hope I can help someone with it by blogging this. BTW: this motherboard rocks! :)
2008-01-21:	News, News, News! You're absolutely right, I'm neglecting you international folks the last months. I hope this will get better now. First: happy new year to all of you! So many things happened. There was the 24th Chaos Communication Congress 2007 (24C3) here in Berlin at the end of the year (like every year). It was very good, if you missed it, I really feel sorry for you. The next thing happened was: I bought an ASUS EEE-PC in Taiwan because ASUS was not able to put this nice little laptop in our shops before Christmas. Worst marketing I've ever seen. However, you might also notice that my advertizing stuff got less after the problems with Google. You remember: they kicked me off just for my domain-names. A very american censorship, maybe they beep their ads if the domains contain "bad words". I thought a lot about this and a friend told me about shirtshops in the internet. You upload your designs and add some profit to the item and those companies are doing all the work: printing, selling and shipping. This looks quite good so I decided to do my very own and here it is: shop.big-asses.de Of course this one is for the great majority of US klicks at my page, so the money is just the Dollar. But there are also other possibilities: ukshop.big-asses.de, the british version, you can pay directly in Pound Sterling japanshop.big-asses.de, the japanese version, paying in japanese Yen espshop.big-asses.de, the spanish version, here the money's still the Euro Of course, if you're coming from another contry you can change the language and the origin yourself. There's a button at the upper right side to change country and language. I just made those 3 subdomains for those ones which are the "bigger visitors" here. I hope you like the items of the shop and maybe buy them (BUY! BUY! BUY! NOW! :)))).
2007-12-25:	Merry Xmas to all of you out there! MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL OF YOU! And maybe one of you will come to the Chaos Communication Congress here in Berlin? It's one of the most important events of the IT community in Europe! And: most of the tracks are in english language! C'mon, spend your end of the year here in Berlin and come to the Congress! :) And by the way: did you see my T-Shirt-Shop yet? The pages can also be switched to english and you can buy there worldwide!
2007-11-01:	One last thing to say after Halloween... I HAD TO DO IT! YES! Do you need the image in full size? Just click this link!
2007-10-31:	Happy Halloween! Ok, it maybe last year's image. But I couldn't do better this year, sorry. Maybe next year? :)
2007-10-23:	New Gallery: Festival Of Lights 2007 For those of you who don't know what the "Festival Of Lights" is about I can really recommend to travel to Berlin! The festival itself is running since a week and will end next week-end. Hurry-up! Don't miss it! To get an idea, what it's all about, try my new page: festivaloflights.big-asses.de I'll also try to add more stuff on that page when I'm shooting more pictures like this. Or try my Fotothing page: Enjoy!
2007-08-30:	New Gallery: Lanzarote 2007! We've been at the Canarian island of Lanzarote in the beginning of this year. I took thousands of pictures and always wanted to show them at my Gallery-Pages, but never had the time to sort them out or do captions for the images. Ok, the captions are German but I think the images speak for themself in any language. If you want to take a look, try this link! Enjoy! If you have any feedback, don't hesitate to tell me!
2007-08-04:	24h Shopping in Berlin! Yes, we got it now! Shopping-spree US-style! We have the first supermarket which starts opening on monday 8am and closes at saturday, 11pm. Yes, that's right: it's open the whole week, except sundays. Sunday is an official holiday and stores will stay closed, but hey: as long as the rest of the week is free for shopping, who cares? You don't believe me? Here are the poster-ads of this store: That's heavy for this country, hm? BTW, lots of other supermarkets also open now until 10pm on weekdays. I think that's the way to relax and shop. Before I always connected shopping with rushing and badging, no time for breathing, run, run, run. Mostly it was too late and lots of stores had been closed. This will not happen to me again, I love it! Oh, I forgot the address: Reichelt Berliner Str. 24 10715 Berlin (Wilmersdorf) That's the Google-Maps-Link to the store. I think lots of Berlin-tourists might think, it's a good idea to go there. :) One last addition: If you go shopping between 10pm and 6am, you'll get a free coffee for staying awake during your shopping spree! :) And if that's not enough Berlin-shopping-feeling, try the Mermgfurt-T-Shirt! If you don't know what "Mermgfurt" means, try this. And if you want to support our movement, you should go here to buy it. Have fun, amigos!
2007-06-09:	New Gallery: WGT 2007 and some nice Canon-Camera ehancements Yes, gals'n'guys, the lazy blogger is writing some sentences in english again. Strange but true. First I want to tell about a new gallery in my photo area. I've been at the WGT (Wave-Gotik-Treffen) in Leipzig 2 weeks ago. This is an international dark festival and if you wasn't there, I can tell: You really missed a big thing! There have been lots of bands and concerts, nice and beautiful people and the possibility of shopping: everything a dark heart loves. Maybe you decide to come next year, too? Here you can find my pictures of the festival, enjoy! The texts are german as always, but I think an image is saying more than thousand words, hm? :) And for those of you who own a digital Canon compact camera, I have some nice addons for you. Some russian guys developed a system for Canon cameras which you can boot from SD card. With this system you also have RAW images in those cameras, which you normally don't have. You can script your own stuff, the battery display is exact etc. They really did an amazing job, this I would recommend as a good starting point. And remember: you don't change anything in the camera, no firmware-update whatsoever. You pull the bootable SD card and the camera is in the original state, so you don't loose any guarantees. I gave it a try and I'm really impressed!
2007-05-14:	Skynet??? I often think about those problems what can happen if a science fiction movie becomes reality. Mostly it's movies like Star Troopers, what's almost in our reality today, although the bugs are the terrorists. It could be that before we're going into space we might be kill ourselves. But there's another way. Remember the Terminator series where robots kill humans. Those robots got their commands from an IT-System, a big network computer. The name of this bastard was Skynet. And now reality is faster than fiction: Skynet is alive! And this is no funny idea of some conspiracy guys, it's the official name for an IT-System of the British Army which controls flying battle robots, which almost look like those in the Terminator movie! Is there a way to save this planet? And: where the hell is John Connor? Is he alive yet? Where's Sarah Connor? C'mon, let's go all out to the mentally ill clinics and search for her! We have to find her until it's too late! :) A sad world, where the only humourous guys are those ones from the Army... BTW, worst of all: what, if Hollywood wants to have license fees for using their names for military purposes? This is a copyright- and branding-violation...