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Rapberry Pi Micro Media-Hub

USB 3.0 VIA Labs Hub Problems

The first attempt was an Amazon Basic USB 3.0 4 ports hub. Unfortunately it is based on the VIA Labs chips, which seems to have a bug, so it is uncompatibile with the Raspberry Pi.

The device is listed on the USB bus:

Bus 001 Device 005: ID 2109:2811 VIA Labs, Inc. Hub

but when you connect even a simple mouse, you get plenty of errors, and the device does not work:

usb 1-1.4.1: new low-speed USB device number 6 using dwc_otg
usb 1-1.4.1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 1-1.4.1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 1-1.4.1: new low-speed USB device number 7 using dwc_otg
usb 1-1.4.1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 1-1.4.1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 1-1.4.1: new low-speed USB device number 8 using dwc_otg
usb 1-1.4.1: device not accepting address 8, error -71
usb 1-1.4.1: new low-speed USB device number 9 using dwc_otg
usb 1-1.4.1: device not accepting address 9, error -71
usb 1-1.4-port1: unable to enumerate USB device

I tried several workarounds: leaving the hub unpowered, attaching an USB 3.0 external hard disk, adding the option dwc_otg.speed=1 into /boot/cmdline.txt. None of that gave a minimal benefit. I returned the hub back to Amazon.

Here are some web references: