I’ve just done a tech check for my LCA lecture. I had initially planned to do what I had done before and use my phone for recording audio and video and my PC for other stuff. The problem is that I wanted to get an external microphone going and plugging in a USB microphone turned off the speaker in the phone (it seemed to direct audio to a non-existent USB audio output). I tried using bluetooth headphones with the USB microphone and that didn’t work. Eventually a viable option seemed to be using USB headphones on my PC with the phone for camera and microphone. Then it turned out that my phone (Huawei Mate 10 Pro) didn’t support resolutions higher than VGA with Chrome (it didn’t have the “advanced” settings menu to select resolution), this is probably an issue of Android build features. So the best option is to use a webcam on the PC, I was recommended a Logitech C922 but OfficeWorks only has a Logitech C920 which is apparently OK.
The free connection test from freeconference.com [1] is good for testing out how your browser works for videoconferencing. It tests each feature separately and is easy to run.
After buying the C920 webcam I found that it sometimes worked and sometimes caused a kernel panic like the following (partial panic log included for the benefit of people Googling this Logitech C920 problem):
[95457.805417] BUG: kernel NULL pointer dereference, address: 0000000000000000 [95457.805424] #PF: supervisor read access in kernel mode [95457.805426] #PF: error_code(0x0000) - not-present page [95457.805429] PGD 0 P4D 0 [95457.805431] Oops: 0000 [#1] SMP PTI [95457.805435] CPU: 2 PID: 75486 Comm: v4l2src0:src Not tainted 5.15.0-2-amd64 #1 Debian 5.15.5-2 [95457.805438] Hardware name: HP ProLiant ML110 Gen9/ProLiant ML110 Gen9, BIOS P99 02/17/2017 [95457.805440] RIP: 0010:usb_ifnum_to_if+0x3a/0x50 [usbcore] ... [95457.805481] Call Trace: [95457.805484][95457.805485] usb_hcd_alloc_bandwidth+0x23d/0x360 [usbcore] [95457.805507] usb_set_interface+0x127/0x350 [usbcore] [95457.805525] uvc_video_start_transfer+0x19c/0x4f0 [uvcvideo] [95457.805532] uvc_video_start_streaming+0x7b/0xd0 [uvcvideo] [95457.805538] uvc_start_streaming+0x2d/0xf0 [uvcvideo] [95457.805543] vb2_start_streaming+0x63/0x100 [videobuf2_common] [95457.805550] vb2_core_streamon+0x54/0xb0 [videobuf2_common] [95457.805555] uvc_queue_streamon+0x2a/0x40 [uvcvideo] [95457.805560] uvc_ioctl_streamon+0x3a/0x60 [uvcvideo] [95457.805566] __video_do_ioctl+0x39b/0x3d0 [videodev]
It turns out that Ubuntu Launchpad bug #1827452 has great information on this problem [2]. Apparently if the device decides it doesn’t have enough power then it will reconnect and get a different USB bus device number and this often happens when the kernel is initialising it. There’s a race condition in the kernel code in which the code to initialise the device won’t realise that the device has been detached and will dereference a NULL pointer and then mess up other things in USB device management. The end result for me is that all USB devices become unusable in this situation, commands like “lsusb” hang, and a regular shutdown/reboot hangs because it can’t kill the user session because something is blocked on USB.
One of the comments on the Launchpad bug is that a powered USB hub can alleviate the problem while a USB extension cable (which I had been using) can exacerbate it. Officeworks currently advertises only one powered USB hub, it’s described as “USB 3” but also “maximum speed 480 Mbps” (USB 2 speed). So basically they are selling a USB 2 hub for 4* the price that USB 2 hubs used to sell for.
When debugging this I used the “cheese” webcam utility program and ran it in a KVM virtual machine. The KVM parameters “-device qemu-xhci -usb -device usb-host,hostbus=1,hostaddr=2” (where 1 and 2 are replaced by the Bus and Device numbers from “lsusb”) allow the USB device to be passed through to the VM. Doing this meant that I didn’t have to reboot my PC every time a webcam test failed.
For audio I’m using the Sades Wand gaming headset I wrote about previously [3].
Russell,
Is it possible to test out my patch in comment #23? Hopefully it can solve your issue.