usb-storage: Add quirk to defeat Kindle's automatic unload
authorAlan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu>
Wed, 17 Mar 2021 19:06:54 +0000 (15:06 -0400)
committerGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Thu, 25 Mar 2021 08:04:14 +0000 (09:04 +0100)
commit7046e5f7a2f66c78a08998964be31da0c635be21
tree3c1c5b003eb27baa0870e35249fedbe3837a4a84
parent5a62d6d7afa06d34b7c1a525b05fb5bddfe7b595
usb-storage: Add quirk to defeat Kindle's automatic unload

commit 546aa0e4ea6ed81b6c51baeebc4364542fa3f3a7 upstream.

Matthias reports that the Amazon Kindle automatically removes its
emulated media if it doesn't receive another SCSI command within about
one second after a SYNCHRONIZE CACHE.  It does so even when the host
has sent a PREVENT MEDIUM REMOVAL command.  The reason for this
behavior isn't clear, although it's not hard to make some guesses.

At any rate, the results can be unexpected for anyone who tries to
access the Kindle in an unusual fashion, and in theory they can lead
to data loss (for example, if one file is closed and synchronized
while other files are still in the middle of being written).

To avoid such problems, this patch creates a new usb-storage quirks
flag telling the driver always to issue a REQUEST SENSE following a
SYNCHRONIZE CACHE command, and adds an unusual_devs entry for the
Kindle with the flag set.  This is sufficient to prevent the Kindle
from doing its automatic unload, without interfering with proper
operation.

Another possible way to deal with this would be to increase the
frequency of TEST UNIT READY polling that the kernel normally carries
out for removable-media storage devices.  However that would increase
the overall load on the system and it is not as reliable, because the
user can override the polling interval.  Changing the driver's
behavior is safer and has minimal overhead.

CC: <stable@vger.kernel.org>
Reported-and-tested-by: Matthias Schwarzott <zzam@gentoo.org>
Signed-off-by: Alan Stern <stern@rowland.harvard.edu>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20210317190654.GA497856@rowland.harvard.edu
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
drivers/usb/storage/transport.c
drivers/usb/storage/unusual_devs.h
include/linux/usb_usual.h