USB ports disappear after reboot / shutdown

[Donman]

Hey all, I've been encountering an annoying USB issue. My motherboard, a Gigabyte Z77-UD3H, has two USB 3.0 controllers onboard. One of them is an Intel controller, which works flawlessly, while the other is VIA. Basically what happens is the VIA ports will stop working (and the controller will disappear from lspci) whenever I reboot or shutdown then restart my machine. To get them working again, I need to shutdown and then unplug the power from the computer for a few seconds then turn it back on. I'm really at a loss as to what is causing this issue, since it persists no matter how many times I shutdown and restart until I completely remove the power. Also, I don't have this problem at all with Windows 7 fwiw.

My current kernel is gentoo-sources-3.5.4. I had this problem with gentoo-sources-3.5.3 as well. Here is my kernel .config, my dmesg with usb working (I plugged in my usb sound card into one of the VIA ports so it would show on the dmesg, it's the FiiO USB DAC-E17), my lspci -knn with usb working, my dmesg without usb working, and my lspci -knn without usb working.

If anyone has any idea of what's going on and how to fix it I'd love to hear about it!

EDIT: Added kernel version information.

[eccerr0r]

Usually if the device disappears from lspci, it's probably a hardware issue being programmed wrong by software. It sounds like Linux may be putting the via in a bad state for shutdown.

When you boot the machine, is there a way to display the hardware BIOS found, and make sure it's also not seeing the VIA controller in BIOS when it's in the "bad" state?

Could you try seeing if there's a firmware update that would fix it despite clearly pointing to be a Linux issue?

I really despise VIA hardware, I've not had any VIA hardware that I liked, they're all slow or buggy...
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

[Donman]

My soundcard has a display that will notify when it has a USB connection, so I've been using that to check. When the USB ports go down, it stops displaying that notification. But I also plugged a bootable usb stick in back there, and it was absent from my BIOS boot menu.

I did some testing though, and rolled my kernel back to 3.5.2. With this kernel I don't have this issue anymore. There is another thing though, that happens on this kernel and newer versions. I've got a Ralink 2770 based usb wireless adapter, and it hardlocks the computer whenever using the VIA slots. Possibly related? I've not taken the time to really test things without it though.

I looked on VIA's website, and didn't see anything but Windows drivers.