Suggestion on getting Via VL805 PCIe USB card working

Operating Systems & Open Source Linux
1

I picked up a cheap PCIe USB 3.0 controller card from Amazon, ELUTENG PCIE USB 3.0 Card, which appears to use a VIA VL805 controller.

I guess I should have done a little more research as it seems that this doesn’t work properly under Linux, it works fine in Windows. It seems that the card is recognized but no devices plugged into the USB ports do not connect to the system:

 -> % lspci | grep VIA
08:00.0 USB controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VL805 USB 3.0 Host Controller (rev 01)
 -> %

Any suggestions on how to get this working? Or would it be best to return this and get another with better Linux support?

2

The easiest thing would be to return it, but you definitely could try to get it working. Might require some kernel hacking though.

3

Try the kernel boot parameter iommu=soft. You also may need to disable IOMMU in the bios of the motherboard. Source- https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1376455

Also, there might be a firmware update available, depending on what the current version is. You may need to contact VIA for the files.

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4

Thanks a lot, setting iommu=soft did the trick. I’ll also reach out to VIA and see if there’s a firmware update available!

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