Lenovo L13 yoga 'Maybe the usb cable is bad' error when trying to register

[george1421]

@jj-fullmer I wonder if there is nic card firmware missing. This is telling me its now loading and talking to the network adapter, its having a problem fully communicating with it. When you have time boot into debug mode and then search /var/logs/syslog for that network adapter and see if there are any hints in there to why its not happy.

[JJ Fullmer]

@george1421 On it! Going to try it still using your test kernel

[JJ Fullmer]

@george1421 First notes are it says at the start

ucsi_acpi USBC000:00 con1: failed to register alternate modes
ucsi_acpi USBC000:00 con2: failed to register alt modes

It didn’t get into debug mode, gonna try again with the normal kernel, and if that doesn’t go into debug then I’ll try the latest 4.x

[JJ Fullmer]

Photo of the output when attempting debug with test kernel

Photo of output when attempting normal deploy task with test kernel

[JJ Fullmer]

Actually, when I hit enter to continue it did boot into the FOS debug console

[JJ Fullmer]

@george1421
There wasn’t a /var/log/syslog in the debug console, I did cat /var/log/messages as that was there and the most interesting bit was at the bottom, it’s a bit much to type out manually at the moment.

I took photos at the sections where I saw warnings

[george1421]

@jj-fullmer Interesting that this computer has an intel ethernet nic in it.

Duh, and blind. It is missing a hardware driver. SO this last images was that from the one-off kernel or from the FOG standard kernel?

[JJ Fullmer]

@george1421 It does, but it requires a special proprietary dongle. We actually have one, but we can’t find it anywhere.

[george1421]

@jj-fullmer sorry I had an update “Duh, and blind. It is missing a hardware driver. SO this last images was that from the one-off kernel or from the FOG standard kernel?”

[JJ Fullmer]

@george1421 The one off kernel.

[JJ Fullmer]

@george1421
Here’s the 5.6.18 kernel debug messages, slightly different, but not that different.

[JJ Fullmer]

@george1421 I’m now trying the 4.19.146 64bit kernel from tom via the fog web gui kernel update page

[JJ Fullmer]

Here is kernel 4.19.146
This time it acted like it was going to work but never got an ip address.

I’m going to try something that shouldn’t work now. This laptop has a feature to do mac address pass through which I have enabled so that the usb-c ethernet can be used for imaging on different devices without needing to remove it from fog hosts. I’m going to try disabling that and I’ll use my default 5.6.18 kernel. I can’t imagine this will change anything, but might as well try everything.

[JJ Fullmer]

@george1421 I was just reviewing some internal documentation on this dongle and it looks like we’ve gone down this road once before. I have notes about a custom kernel for this adapter where the realtek driver was modified to work with the microsoft usb-c ethernet adapter. Time to search through some old posts.

[george1421]

@jj-fullmer Sorry I was having fun playing with the flash compiler at work.

Here is the updated bzImage5618RT3 with the firmware it was missing from the previous image [rtl_nic/rtl8153a-3.fw] : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1vSu5L-DAZYK7VYiJtFfCYrrqJb963cMg/view?usp=sharing

Here is the 5.9.3 version with the updated firmware bzImage593RT3 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1O-4tvx4DywWef75qfSxLRK9M6CoDS9pd/view?usp=sharing

For your case the 5.9.3 version has no advantage over 5.6.18. The 5.9.3 does have a few new network adapters and some in the 10Gb and 40Gb range. Also realtek 8125 2Gb nic.

[JJ Fullmer]

@george1421 I found the last time we did this
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/13905/issue-with-netcard-of-dock-gen2-of-lenovo-l390/22?_=1608147371899

I am actually imaging one of the l390’s at the moment (the l13 is the successor to the L390). But I’m pretty sure the problem is related to just the usb-c adapter. I’ll try the 2 you just made, starting with 5.9.3

[george1421]

@jj-fullmer The other thread referenced new hardware IDs. I did not change that on the updated kernels. Hopefully those numbers will be in there. I think so because the picture said it was working just couldn’t load the firmware.

[JJ Fullmer]

@george1421 So it didn’t get the the firmware load error, is says that was fine but still no ip address.

What’s also odd is it seemed to change the laptop’s keyboard behavior, I could no longer use Shift+PgUp/down to scroll through the output. It acted as if pgup was just up.

This one did load into FOS without any errors at least, just didn’t actually connect to the network. I haven’t tried messing with the mac address pass through yet.
Gonna give the 5618RT3 a try
Then I’ll try the one from a year ago if needed

[george1421]

@jj-fullmer It looks like it should be working I now see the carrier detect that was missing previously without the firmware installed. Did an ip a s show an ip address?

[JJ Fullmer]

@george1421 It did not. I gave the bzImage5618RT3 a go and that one is working. The keyboard is also working as expected. So there’s something else in 5.9.3 that is causing an issue with this machine.
Did you change anything else other than this driver and firmware for this kernel? Would it be safe to try using this one as default for all hosts? Or is there something else in there that might cause pause?