Card Reader of the Acer Aspire One

By | 4 Oct 2008

Model: JMicron JMB38x PCI Express to 1394a OHCI and Memory Card Host Controller

Enabling the device

The cardreader device seems to be hidden on bootup and you have to enable it by issuing:

setpci -d 197b:2381 AE=47

This didn’t work on the commandline but inside the rc.local, my 16GiB SDcard in the left slot was recognized fine.

Multicard-reader driver

The right-hand SD slot is actually a multi-card reader for MMC, SD, xD and MemoryStick. This device doesn’t seem to be recognized by my Ubuntu.

There’s a project called TI FlashMedia xx12/xx21 driver which also contains the kernel modules for the jmb38x. The Linpus Linux on the A150L loads modules with exactly those names: jmb38x_xd, flash_bd, memstick, mspro_block, xd_card and jmb38x_ms.

The UbuntuForums contain a HowTo for installing the TI-part of that driver. I proceeded the same way but installed those modules mentioned above instead of the TI ones. Modprobing them on command-line worked fine, but after adding the modprobes to the rc.local, the next boot ended up in continuous soft lockups.

So make sure you keep an USB stick with the SysRescCD handy.

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