[plug] USB2.0 PCI & Linux

[Brad Campbell]

Trevor Phillips wrote:
> I'm looking at picking up a cheapo USB2.0 PCI card (as a tide-over till my 
> work PC gets an upgrade). Are there many concerns about Linux support with 
> these, or are they all rather common & well supported interfaces?
> 

Most of them conform to the EHCI interface and will work pretty well out of the box.
The early NEC chipsets had speed limits (about 16MB/s) in the silicon, but they were the first EHCI 
interfaces on the market so you can excuse that. Some cards still use these chips however.
VIA have known problems with dropping interrupts, but the later kernels have workarounds for those 
and can actually run an EHCI interface without any interrupts at all, although quite a bit slower.

In short, they all will work and if your not into max speed then any of them will do.

I have an NEC, VIA and ALi and all three of them kick along quite happily.

It is generally regarded as good advice to steer clear of the VIA chips if it's possible. ALi and 
NEC seem to be pretty well regarded and supported.

Regards,
Brad