USB Issue on Raspberry Pi 4 Running Fedora - Simple Solution

3 minutes to read

When Fedora runs on Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB/8GB RAM models, the USB ports might not be working out-of-box as of Fedora 32 and Linux kernel 5.8. In this post, I will introduce a very simple solution to this problem that only requires you to add one line to a configuration file.

Notes and Caveats

  • If you are using the 2GB model, then rest assured - the USB ports should work out-of-box, and you do not need to do anything. This issue exists only on the 4GB and 8GB models.

  • This method will limit the amount of RAM available to the operating system to 3 GiB. If this will affect your workloads, please consider using a more complex solution that requires more steps but does not decrease the amount of available RAM.

Symptoms

The USB ports of your Raspberry Pi are working on other operating systems, including Raspberry Pi OS, but they fail on Fedora. The dmesg | grep xhci_hcd command gives you the following messages:

$ dmesg | grep xhci_hcd
[   19.961404] xhci_hcd 0000:01:00.0: xHCI Host Controller
[   19.974551] xhci_hcd 0000:01:00.0: new USB bus registered, assigned bus number 1
[   29.988717] xhci_hcd 0000:01:00.0: can't setup: -110
[   30.000126] xhci_hcd 0000:01:00.0: USB bus 1 deregistered
[   30.021077] xhci_hcd 0000:01:00.0: init 0000:01:00.0 fail, -110
[   30.033104] xhci_hcd: probe of 0000:01:00.0 failed with error -110

Steps

  1. Turn off your Raspberry Pi and remove the SD card, then insert the card into a computer.

  2. On the computer, open up your SD card’s boot partition (which should be the first partition with size of 600 MiB), then edit config.txt. Add the following line to the file:

    total_mem=3072

  3. Save the file and safely eject the SD card. Insert it back into the Raspberry Pi and boot it up.

And that’s it; this method is as simple as that. Try running dmesg | grep xhci_hcd again, and the error messages should disappear. Insert a USB device, it should start to work.

As suggested by the option name itself, total_mem=3072 limits the memory to 3072 MiB. Depending on how you use your Raspberry Pi, this amount of memory might be more than enough; but, if you do need more memory than that, and you want to use USB devices on Raspberry Pi, please use another solution I introduce in a separate post, which takes more steps but does not decrease available memory.

References

This solution was adapted from a bug ticket for Ubuntu. In the solution posted there, the line is added to another file usercfg.txt. I have tried it, and it did not work for Fedora. Nevertheless, adding the line to config.txt works and should have the same effect.