• suspecting kernel issue with USB-to-serial device

    From Robert Riches@21:1/5 to All on Sun May 18 04:04:57 2025
    Is anyone else seeing odd behavioral changes in the 6.1.0-34 and
    later kernels for USB-to-serial devices?

    I'm running Devuan Daedalus with the supplied 6.1.0 kernels. I
    have an Insteon modem (the kind that works without their servers)
    that apparently has a USB-to-serial chip:

    Bus 006 Device 004: ID 0403:6001 Future Technology Devices International, Ltd FT232 Serial (UART) IC

    The Insteon modem is set up to turn my outdoor lights on a dusk
    and off at dawn using a Python script. The script talks via the
    Python serial library to device /dev/ttyUSB0. It was working
    with reasonable reliability in a few Devuan releases (and perhaps
    other distros prior to that) up through the 6.1.0-33 kernel
    update. However, starting with the very evening after updating
    to the 6.1.0-34 kernel, the lights don't change state reliably.

    I have four switches that control the outdoor lights, so the
    Python script sends four commands for each state change. If I
    manually send commands to each with at intervals of several
    seconds, that appears to be more reliable than sending all four
    commands in fairly rapid succession.

    Also, the script has a feature to blink a single switch at a 50%
    duty cycle and 2-second period (aka 1 second on, 1 second off).
    That feature has also become much less reliable starting with the
    update to kernel 6.1.0-34. Even when the lights go on and off,
    the timing is badly distorted.

    I had assumed that drivers related to the USB-to-serial chip
    (and/or the chip itself) would take care of flow control. That
    appeared to be working for several year. However, the symptoms
    seem to be consistent with a hypothesis that commands get dropped
    if there isn't an interval of a few seconds between commands.

    Is anyone else seeing anything similar to this after updating to
    kernel 6.1.0-34?

    --
    Robert Riches
    spamtrap42@jacob21819.net
    (Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)

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