[gentoo-user] USB mouse disconnecting

[Pouru Lasse]

For the past few weeks I've had strange issues with my USB mouse
randomly disconnecting and reconnecting right afterwards. At first I
thought it might be the USB port dying, but it happens with multiple USB
ports (both USB 2 and 3) and two different Logitech mice. I haven't
noticed any issues with other USB devices.

Is this more likely a hardware or a software problem? I'm on kernel
4.14.83 and I'm pretty sure the problems didn't start right after the
update, although it's hard to tell because the disconnects seem
completely random and don't even happen every day. Dmesg output looks
something like this, sometimes with multiple disconnects in a row, with
the device number being incremented each time:

[41235.377257] usb 3-2: USB disconnect, device number 17
[41235.645027] usb 3-2: new low-speed USB device number 18 using xhci_hcd
[41235.778228] usb 3-2: New USB device found, idVendor=046d, idProduct=c01e
[41235.778232] usb 3-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=0
[41235.778234] usb 3-2: Product: USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse
[41235.778236] usb 3-2: Manufacturer: Logitech
[41235.783149] input: Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:14.0/usb3/3-2/3-2:1.0/0003:046D:C01E.001A/input/input41
[41235.783504] hid-generic 0003:046D:C01E.001A: input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.10 Mouse [Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse] on usb-0000:00:14.0-2/input0

Less often there are also errors like:

[13844.911317] usb 3-2: device not accepting address 15, error -71
[13844.911362] usb usb3-port2: unable to enumerate USB device

and:

[42555.126541] usb 3-2: reset low-speed USB device number 18 using xhci_hcd
[42555.382373] usb 3-2: device descriptor read/64, error -71
[42555.763574] usb 3-2: device descriptor read/all, error -71
[42556.022536] usb 3-2: reset low-speed USB device number 18 using xhci_hc

Usually the mouse starts working again right away, but sometimes I need
to switch it to another port despite it being visible in lsusb. This, I
guess, has something to do with the device number changing.

One thing I suspected was USB power management, but as far as I know I
haven't enabled any such options, at least not on purpose.

- Lasse