Isuue with USB in Kickstart

So, not sure if I just inadvertently discovered a bug, of if I'm not understanding the boot process quite thoroughly enough.

For reasons I'll go into later, I decided to test some different versions of "ehci.usbhcd". I figured, I've got a rescue boot USB stick so it's can't hurt? Right? Wrong!

We're in "SYS:Kickstart" for all of the following...

So I renamed "ehci.usbhcd" to "ehci.usbhcd.org". I copied in an older version of "ehci.usbhcd" and rebooted. I wasn't desperately surprised to find the older file from the installer CD gives errors and leaves me without keyboard or mouse since USB is the only option. No worries, thinks I, I'll just boot my rescue USB stick. Again, WRONG!

Yep, the system boots from USB and uses all of the stuff off the USB. For the most part. The USB is "ADHD0", normal is "DH0" (I think), actually I should check that, but I think it is. The priority for the USB is higher, so it does boot this disk, and I can tell that it has because different backdrop, resolution, sound effect on startup, everything basically different. With one exception. It's still using the "new" (old) USB driver and my keyboard and mouse still don't work. Oops!!

This seems like a bug to me? I checked my USB stick under emulation and sure enough, it's the USB driver from 2021 so that should be what's used when I boot from the USB stick, shouldn't it? But nope, the system is somehow finding the one from DH0 and using that.

That leaves me very confused and sad. Fortunately, now we have OS4 under QEMU, it was trivial to remove the SSD from my X5000, attach it to my laptop via a USB adapter, boot an emulated Pegasus system and rename the file back. So I'm out of trouble.

OK, why was I doing this in the first place? Well I'm getting fed up with the USB timeouts and boot issues caused by it (slow boot basically) and was just curious to see if there was a point between the Jan 2021 driver that works with all the timeouts and the install CD that doesn't work that might not suffer the timeouts and issues.

Given the hassle of removing the driver every time I get to the point "nope, still no better" I'm not sure I'll bother! At least until I've setup FTP access to the SYS partition!

@MartinW
Booting from USB sticks or HDs often doesn't work directly, the default timeouts are smaller than it takes for initializing the USB hardware, you may have to use "usb reset" in U-Boot first before booting from USB works.
I guess that was the problem: The kickstart was loaded from your SSD because USB (with higher boot priority) wasn't ready yet, but after the kickstart modules are loaded and started from SSD the USB hardware is ready and your Workbench:/SYS: with different backdrop, etc. is loaded from USB.

The usual, and more secure way, to test different kickstart modules is to make a copy of the Kicklayout with a different label, for example "test", and the different kickstart module(s).
To boot the test Kicklayout you have to manually select it in the SLB boot menu in U-Boot. If it doesn't work for some reason the "default"/"AmigaOS 4.1" one still does.
A 3rd Kicklayout I always have is a "failsafe" one with known to be working kickstart modules in a different directory. That helped if there were problems with AmigaOS 4.x kickstart module updates, but since there are none anymore that may not be important anymore.

Thanks for the info Joerg. I will look into the reset usb from the firmware. But now you mention it, I remember that being a thing for booting MOS.

I never had any luck with creating multiple kick layouts when I tried before but things have moved on in qemu now so I can try in there before going anywhere near the x5000. Great advice!

[edit] Now sorted - managed to find a combination of settings that reduces my boot time normally but if I hold esc I can bring up the menu and choose a different kick layout without additional menu delays. (boota_timeout=2 gives just enough time to not delay things, but also get in there and choose another option when desired)

@MartinWQuote:

To have multiple kicklayouts on your X5000 simply just open up the Kickstart/kicklayout file in an texteditor, copy all the lines and paste them at the end of the file.
Goto the line that begins with the "LABEL" keyword and change it into something like "LABEL Amigaos 4.1 with broken usb"

next time you hardreset your X5000 amigaboot will allow you to select two kicklayouts to boot from.
One with the original name and one with the name "Amigaos4.1 with broken usb"

(The amigaboot menu will not appear if the u-boot variable amigaboot_quiet is set to 'y'

In quiet mode it simply boots the chosen/best/first (whatever) configuration.


When booting with multiple kicklayouts works you can simply just change the lines for the modules you would like to experiment with to make them load from another place, like Kickstart/testing/ehci.usbhcd

Yeah, it was the quiet setting causing the problem. I couldn’t for the life of me work out how or where I was meant to be given the choice!