Hi everyone. I have a strange USB device behaviour. The device is a joystick:
mango:/etc/modprobe.d # lsusb
(...)
Bus 002 Device 007: ID 068e:00a6 CH Products, Inc.
(...)

My system is OpenSuSE 12.1
mango:/etc/modprobe.d # uname -a
Linux mango 3.1.10-1.16-desktop #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Jun 27 05:21:40 UTC 2012 (d016078) x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux


After plug-in the device it all seems to be ok:

mango:/etc/modprobe.d # tail -f /var/log/messages
Oct 15 01:31:30 mango kernel: [ 1241.832024] usb 2-5: new low speed USB device number 8 using ohci_hcd
Oct 15 01:31:30 mango kernel: [ 1242.023040] usb 2-5: New USB device found, idVendor=068e, idProduct=00a6
Oct 15 01:31:30 mango kernel: [ 1242.023044] usb 2-5: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
Oct 15 01:31:30 mango kernel: [ 1242.023047] usb 2-5: Product: CH 3 AXIS 2 INPUT CONTROL
Oct 15 01:31:30 mango kernel: [ 1242.023049] usb 2-5: Manufacturer: CH PRODUCTS
Oct 15 01:31:30 mango kernel: [ 1242.042095] input: CH PRODUCTS CH 3 AXIS 2 INPUT CONTROL as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.0/usb2/2-5/2-5:1.0/input/input10
Oct 15 01:31:30 mango kernel: [ 1242.042275] generic-usb 0003:068E:00A6.0007: input,hidraw1: USB HID v1.00 Joystick [CH PRODUCTS CH 3 AXIS 2 INPUT CONTROL] on usb-0000:00:02.0-5/input0

But the device is actually not responsive. jstest shows no movement on axes and button. I first suspected the SDL lib, but then realized that even cat /dev/input/js0 gives no output neither when moving axes nor pressing buttons.

mango:/etc/modprobe.d # cat /dev/input/js0
�@��@��@���@���@��^C

And that's it - no more output when moving axes and pressing buttons.

I checked the joy on MS Windows machine - it worked fine. After that I checked the other linux machine, and... it worked. I don't have the access to this computer now, but the dmesg output after I plugged the joy was almost the same with the difference that there was ehci_hcd instead of ohci_hcd. After that I checked the other machines with OpenSuSE 12.1 and 12.2, and realized that joy is working on each intel based machine, and not working on AMD. Feeling kinda dizzy and a little frustrated as this seems to be hardware related and actually I have no idea how to solve this issue. I am currently running AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+ based on MCP55 mainboard. The joystick is not working here. Any ideas?

I checked another USB joystick (Bus 002 Device 004: ID 06a3:0464 Saitek PLC Cyborg Evo) and it works fine on all the machines.
Also found one machine with Intel CPU, on which the 068e:00a6 CH Products, Inc. joystick is not working and found that on EVERY machine that joystick is working it is working basing on ehci_hcd and on every machine failed it is ohci_hcd. I tried:

# lspci -v|grep HCI
00:0b.0 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP51 USB Controller (rev a3) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])
00:0b.1 USB controller: NVIDIA Corporation MCP51 USB Controller (rev a3) (prog-if 20 [EHCI])
07:08.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): VIA Technologies, Inc. VT6306/7/8 [Fire II(M)] IEEE 1394 OHCI Controller (rev c0) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])

This accidentally caused the joystick working. I dig for another hour, and realized, that there is a walk around.
After I plug the device I need to call lsusb -v as a superuser (both sudo, and calling that from root console is OK). This makes the device working fine. Calling lsusb without -v option or calling this from "regular" user console is not enough.

My user is tomek, so I made a hack to make this joy working:
So:
added new group

# groupadd foousb

added myself to this group:
# groupmod -A tomek foousb

added one line to sudoers:
#visudo
(...)
%foousb ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/lsusb
(...)

After that I made a script on my account:

-------------------------------------
#!/bin/sh
sudo /usr/bin/lsusb -v > /dev/null 2>&1
-------------------------------------

Running this script each time after I plug the joystick make it work. Hope this will help someone in the future. Anyway - I will be grateful if someone could please explain to me, what is actually happening here.