I own two USB devices, a Wacom graphics tablet and a portable USB2 hard drive. While both of these devices work beautifully on their own, getting them to coexist has been somewhat of a challenge.

The Wacom tablet, a USB 1.1 device, depends primarily on two major kernel drivers to function - evdev and usb-ohci. The USB2 hard drive relies on ehci-hcd and usb-storage.

After booting, either the tablet will work or the hard drive will, but not both. Mount usually complains that /dev/sda1 is an invalid block device if something's gone wrong on the drive's end. After mucking with rmmod and modprobe a bit, I can get both devices to function by removing the ehci-hcd module from memory, but the hard drive functions in low-bandwidth USB1.1 mode. If I modprobe ehci-hcd into the mix again, the drive will function at USB2 speed, but the tablet all out ceases to function. I've also tried removing the usb-ohci module from memory and leaving the EHCI one. Again, the tablet ceases to function.

What I seem to have here is a conflict of interest. Or a conflict of modules, anyway.

I'm using Slackware 10 with the stock bare.i kernel (kernel 2.4.26). Is there a way to bind the said modules to specific devices, instead of it being one module controlling the whole USB root at a time?

Thanks in advance,

Mike "Moltag" Redd

Nevermind, I figured it out. For anyone who runs into similar problems later on, the fix involves adding a mere two lines to your /etc/modules.conf file.

Add the following lines and things should work like a champ upon the next reboot:

Hours of headache for two lines of settings. Live and learn, I suppose.

-MJR