Renesas Usb 3.0 Driver Problems



Last updated: 25 Jul, 2016
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Last updated: 25 Jul, 2016
Views: 23829
Updated: 25 Jul, 2016
by Andrew Sharrad

Issues

There are a number of issues regarding 3.0 controllers primarily with Windows 7. This article highlights some of the more common problems as well as work-arounds for them. A driver package tor the four most common groups of USB 3.0 controllers is available at the end of this article.

Please Note: These issues are not specific to Stone PCs or desktops but rather are related to the chipsets and drivers supplied from the chipset manufacturer.

USB 3.0 Controllers Affected

The main controllers addresses by this article are:

  • Renesas1: Renesas first generation USB 3.0 Controller uPD720200 and uPD720200a, as used in the Intel 6 Series Desktop boards
  • Renesas2: Renesas second generation USB 3.0 Controller uPD720201 and uPD720202 as used in some high end motherboards
  • Intel7: Intel first generation USB 3.0 controller as Integrated into the 7 Series Intel Chipset, such as Q77, HM75 etc.
  • Intel8/9: Intel second and third generation USB 3.0 controllers as integrated into the 8 and 9 Series Intel chipsets, such as the Q87.
  • Intel 1x0: Intel fourth generation USB 3.0 controllers as integrated into the Skylake series chipsets such as the H110M, B150 and Q170.
  • ASMedia 104x and 107x Controllers.

​Native support for most of these controllers is available from within Windows 8.1; the Windows 8 / Windows 8.1 in-box driver is not affected by the issues discussed in this article.

Problem 1 - Intermittent Device Response with Third Party Applications

Applications which monitor the USB ports on a system may not work, or USB devices in the system may have intermittent issues

Cause

The USB 3.0 Controllers above install their own port monitoring application by default. This notifies you, for example, if you plug a USB 3.0 device into a USB 2.0 port. The monitoring application monitors all ports on the system including USB 2.0 ports and issues can be seen across all ports in the system.

The conflict between the driver's port monitoring application and an add-application which is also probing the USB ports can cause either program to cease working, or the USB ports themselves may intermittently fail to respond or detect devices.

Resolution

  • Renesas1, Intel7 and Intel8/9:
    • Uninstall the driver
    • Reboot
    • Reinstall the driver using the INF only method, using Device manager to install the basic driver components only. The monitoring application is not installed using this method, and the conflict is resolved.
  • ​Renesas2 - either follow the method for Renesas1 above, or:
    • ​Uninstall the driver
    • Reboot
    • Reinstall the driver using the /v'NO_MONITOR=1' switch to prevent the monitoring application from being installed. In the Stone USB 3.0 driver package, this is also available as silentsetup_no_monitor.bat
  • ASMedia
    • ​Uninstall the driver
    • Reboot
    • Install the driver in theStone USB 3.0 driver package as this does not include a USB monitoring application.

See also Problem 5 for a similar issue around Smart Technologies Smartboard or Smarttablet drivers.

Problem 2 - VMWare Player or VMWare Workstation USB Removable Device / Passthrough does not work

In this situation VMWare products are not able to take control of the USB device and pass it through to the guest operating system. When you attempt to connect the device to the guest operating system, you get an error message that the device is in use on the host.

Resolution 1

Ensure the VMWare USB Arbitration service is running in Computer Management > Services.

Resolution 2

Use the same resolution as for Problem 1. Then once you have removed the USB monitoring program, you should be able to assign the USB device to the guest operating system.

Note: This problem appears to be more prevalent on Intel 8/9 Series USB controllers than other models, and has been verified to exist on VMWare Player 6.0.3

Problem 3 - Intel USB 3.0 Controller Driver May not Install through WDS / MDT / CC4 / SCCM

When you use the INF driver and deploy this through a driver package, the Intel 7 or 8/9 driver may not install properly. The 'Intel(R) USB 3.0 Root Hub' is listed in device manager as an Unknown device, or with a yellow exclamation mark on it. Device Manager reports that the driver is not installed correctly.

Cause

The cause is a problem with the way the driver and driver ID is constructed. The device has an ID of USB3ROOT_HUB30&VID_8086_PID_1E31 whilst the driver does not have an INF that matches closely enough for the deployment process such as WDS to use it.

Resolution

  • Reinstall the driver after the initial build of the system. This can be done either using the standard setup program, or, for larger scale deployments such as an SCCM build, use a task sequence and the silent setup option included in the Stone USB 3.0 driver package.
  • If you require that the Intel USB monitor program is not installed you can still use the INF only method after the operating system has been installed. To do this programatically, use the drivers in the INF_Only folder and the install.bat file. This needs to be run with Administrative privileges.

Problem 4 - Upgrade to Windows 8 will not proceed with the Manufacturer USB 3.0 driver Installed

If you attempt to upgrade to Windows 8 from Windows 7 the upgrade checker may report that the USB 3.0 controller driver is not compatible.

Resolution

  • Uninstall the USB 3.0 controller driver
  • Upgrade to Windows 8
  • Install the latest Windows 8 USB 3.0 controller driver IF Windows does not automatically install a driver during the upgrade. Use of the Windows in-box driver is recommended where possible.

Problem 5 - Smart Technologies Table or Smart Technologies Smartboard drivers cause the system keyboard to be Unresponsive

Similar to Problem 1, some versions of the Smart Technologies Product Drivers can cause problems when a USB 3.0 controller is installed in the system. This has been verified on Windows 7 and the 2010 version of the Smart Technologies driver package.

When you boot the system, the keboard and or mouse may be unresponsive until you remove them and then plug them back in.

Removing the USB 3.0 controller monitor program does not resolve the problem. The problem has been seen on H61, B75, Q77 and H81 systems.

Cause

The drivers themselves appear to cause system problems as they were not designed to be aware of USB 3.0 controllers. The issues are evident even if you are not using the USB 3.0 ports on the system.

Resolution

Either seek updated drivers from Smart Technologies, or if you are not connecting the Smartboard / Smarttable to the problem system, just uninstall the Smart Technologies driver package from Control Panel. The rest of the Smart Technology software will continue to function without the driver package.

Stone USB 3.0 Driver Package

A driver package is available that contains the most up to date Windows 7 USB 3.0 controller drivers for all six mentioned controllers as of 25/7/16. This package includes:

  • The standard setup program
  • Silent setup program (batch file)
  • Silent setup program with no monitoring application - Renesas 2 controller only (batch file)
  • INF installer only (no monitoring program)

Windows 7 Drivers for x86 and x64 are included. Download here.

Applies to:

  • Desktop and Laptop products with USB 3.0 controllers, running Windows 7
Last updated: 25 Jul, 2016
Updated: 25 Jul, 2016 by Andrew Sharrad
SMART Board Software Causes Intermittent loss of Keyboard and/or Mouse on System Start
How to Install Windows 7 on Skylake based systems - Overcoming USB issues such as Keyboard not working or Installation Media not found

Stone Branded Products -> Laptops, Netbooks and Tablets -> Troubleshooting
Stone Branded Products -> Stone Software Products -> Driver Packs for CC4


  1. Firmware and Driver Updates to NEC (Renesas) USB 3.0, plus controller-unloading fix Problem: NEC (now Renesas) USB 3.0 controller dropping un-loading it self from device manager. My ASUS U3S6 card had this problem, since the firmware update the hub controller has not dropped un-loaded at all.
  2. In device manager I discovered an exclamation mark at the 'Renesas USB 3.0 extensible host controller', with error code 10. The only way to 'solve' this problem is to shutdown my computer and unplug the powercord for a couple of minutes, afterwhich the usb ports work again, until the next time I put my desktop to sleep.
  3. Renesas USB MCU USB Peripheral Mass Storage Class Driver (PMSC) using Basic Mini Firmware: 日本語: Sample Code: ZIP: 8.16 MB: Mar 28, 2016: Renesas USB MCU USB Peripheral Human Interface Devices Class Driver (PHID) using Basic Mini Firmware: 日本語: Sample Code: ZIP: 8.06 MB: Mar 28, 2016.

Renesas Electronics Usb 3.0 Driver

To fix the problem, you can try downloading the Renesas USB 3.0 driver manually. You can visit the PC or the motherboard manufacturer’s website and download the chipset drivers. To download the correct drivers, you need to know the PC model or the motherboard model, and the version of Windows 10 (see How to Get Operating System Version).

USB 3.0 extension cards based on Renesas uPD720202 chipset appear to be somewhat problematic when Linux is used as operating system. This may also apply to other Renesas USB chipsets as well. This post is about the difficulties I experienced when trying to use such an extension card with Linux, and a tool to upload required firmware to the chipset.

Fix renesas usb 3.0 driver issue on windows 10

Preface

The uPD720202 chipset requires additional firmware to operate. It must be either uploaded by the driver during initialization, or can be stored on an external EEPROM. Its open to the vendor to choose one of these options. For the first case, there exists a patch for the Linux kernel driver for this chipset to support uploading the firmware image at boot time. But apparently, this patch never made it into the kernel and I have not found the firmware image in the linux-firmware repository. Apparently, at least some of the cards equipped with an EEPROM do initially not function properly with Linux, and maybe even with Windows. They are either shipped with no firmware at all, or at least with outdated firmware.

Long story short: My card simply did nothing but pause the boot process for about 30 seconds until the driver gave up, complaining about being unable to setup the card and quitting with exit code -110:

Feb 5 19:43:18 atom kernel: [ 33.285715] xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: can’t setup: -110
Feb 5 19:43:18 atom kernel: [ 33.285944] xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: USB bus 6 deregistered
Feb 5 19:43:18 atom kernel: [ 33.286142] xhci_hcd 0000:02:00.0: init 0000:02:00.0 fail, -110
Feb 5 19:43:18 atom kernel: [ 33.286199] xhci_hcd: probe of 0000:02:00.0 failed with error -110

Dead ends …

So the question is: With which kind of extension card am I dealing with? The datasheet of the uPD720202 chipset provides information about some useful registers. The „External ROM Access Control and Status Register“ suggests that my card is equipped with EEPROM, since the „External ROM Exists“ bit is set (in fact, it is the only bit set after boot):

root@atom:~# setpci -s 02:00.0 f6.w
8000

So my first take was to update the firmware of the chipset. Sadly, I was unable to find any working tool which would enable me to upload the firmware into the EEPROM for Linux, even though the process itself is documented quite well in the datasheet of the chipset. In the end, I grabbed an old harddisk and installed Windows on it to be able to install the firmware which was kindly shipped with the driver disk. Pretty much hassle to be able to use a extension card … but at least, it works now? Well, not exactly. The card stops to work with Linux after the power supply is removed. Either the Windows driver does some magic to initalize the card, or the card is not really equipped with an EEPROM and needs to get a firmware upload at boot time?

… and working solutions quirks

The firmware upload functionality works independently from the firmware EEPROM, according to the chipset datasheet. More interestingly, uploaded firmware takes precedence over the firmware stored in the EEPROM. What if this could be done with Linux, too? During my research, I already stumbled upon a blog post discussing the possibility to interface with the chipset using „setpci“. Furthermore, some source code posted in the comments section claimed to implement the EEPROM read and write procedures outlined in the datasheet. This code, whose unknown author I would like to thank a lot, turned out to be a good starting point. I did some major refactoring, cleanup and bugfixing and implemented the firmware upload functionality according to the datasheet. And this did the trick! After uploading and re-initializing the driver, the card became fully functional.

upd72020x-load

The tool for uploading the firmware is called upd72020x-load and available from a GitHub repository. Refer to the README.md file for usage information. For my purposes, I also added the script check-and-init which scans for all uninitialized uPD720202 devices and tries to upload the firmware to them. I integrated the script into the boot process so I do not have to think about uploading the firmware at all. The firmware itself is not included, but it is easily possible to extract the firmware image from the updater for Windows.

upd72020x-load works for me, however: Use it at your own risk!

Renesas Usb 3.0 Driver Issue On Windows 10

Closing Remarks

My card is equipped with the uPD720202 chipset. There exists a different version of this chipset, called uPD720201, which differs only in the number of USB ports provided. Especially, the procedures required to upload the firmware or to read and write the EEPROM are identical. However, i did not test upd72020x-flash with any of those extension cards. However, I got reports which confirmed that the tool works with uPD720201 based cards, too. In any case, please report any bugs you might encounter.





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