USB Surge over boot?

written 2/2/2025

While I was using my computer a little over a hour ago, while booting into Linux Mint I was sent back to the backslash I usually see with my GPU (its own BIOS), I looked down to my motherboard and one of the debug lights were on, pretty sure it was the one retaining to CPU. now after holding the power button down to do a hard reboot, I noticed something, my computer was stuck on my GPU’s BIOS for longer than it should’ve. From the usual 2 second boot to a little over a 20 second before splash.

I thought it was due to the hard reboot, and the computer didn’t like that. Well, thats when I was introduced to that error that you see!

Initially, I ignored it since I was doing a package upgrade, and I thought that there was a possibility that a package messed up USB drivers and I would fix it later… However, my keyboard still worked, webcam too, along with mouse, that was until I tried to access the web, that's when I saw that my wireless card wasn’t being picked up on, however ethernet was. So I plugged into Ethernet and started looking through several websites.

But… I noticed something odd… after running this command

inxi -Fxxxrz ; rfkill list ; iwconfig ; lsusb ; mokutil --sb-state

Now, usually this command would just list your current hardware and software config in a very lengthy and detailed manner (at least on Debian/Ubuntu-based distros), pretty good for attempting to figure out issues with hardware and software. This command should run without issue, however, when I ran it… it would stutter something horrible. A command that should’ve finished within a second without a single issue was stuttering, and when I mean stutter I don’t mean like the terminal would stutter, the whole computer would stutter, it wasn’t just software, during these stutters not even keys on the keyboard would register, complete system wide issues.

Its also great to note that this issue also stemmed out into anything that tries to access a USB stack, which is odd to me since (later on) the real issue will stem itself out.

Now this made me more worried about the current state of my computer, because this shows more than just your standard software issue, this pointed to something more sinister, a full on hardware issue. This is when I decided to reboot again after uninstalling a package I thought was causing the issue and thats when I notice the error message;

usb 1-9: device descriptor read/64, error -110

Now I decided to search it up since this message did pop up after a failed system boot, and it brought me to an article about error -110.

Surge on device. Now since this was happening on several boots I decided to give windows a shot, that's when I realized the stutter wasn’t some weird software issue… so as a last ditch effort I unplugged my computer completely, draining all power I can from the system and… that solved the issue. Idk if its going to show back up but hopefully never.

That still doesn’t answer the question, since the issue stemmed from a thing on a PCIe lane, why was it causing an issue on the USB side of things?

Multiple reports stated that this same error could happen even if it wasn’t USB-related. Which only makes me think that the protocol also puts PCIe errors under the same moniker.