Not initializing for T128 on NixOS

[Henry-Hiles]

Hello! Haven't touched my wheel in about a year, but came back to it today, and I can't get it to work. From a look at lsmod, hid_tmff_new isn't loaded until I modprobe it, but some utilities like jstest-gtk appear to show the wheel a bit, but IDK if this is purely kernel level. My main problem is oversteer doesn't see it. I'd like to see if hid-tmff2 was properly loaded, so I can pinpoint if its an oversteer or hid-tmff2 issue. I'd love some help on this, thanks!

[Henry-Hiles]

Oh, I'm on a T128 BTW.

[Henry-Hiles]

lsusb shows it:

Bus 001 Device 008: ID 044f:b69c ThrustMaster, Inc. Thrustmaster T128X GIP Racing Wheel

[Kimplul]

You can use sudo dmesg -w to check if the driver is being loaded, you should see hid-tmff-new if it's installed etc. and hid-generic otherwise.

Do you remember if you installed the driver via DKMS or the manual method? If you used the manual method, I suspect you've received a kernel update within the last year or so, which means you'll have to reinstall the driver. Kernel modules are very tightly coupled to the exact kernel version that they were compiled for, and DKMS is generally the preferred installation option because it automatically recompiles modules when needed.

[Henry-Hiles]

You can use sudo dmesg -w to check if the driver is being loaded, you should see hid-tmff-new if it's installed etc. and hid-generic otherwise.

Do you remember if you installed the driver via DKMS or the manual method? If you used the manual method, I suspect you've received a kernel update within the last year or so, which means you'll have to reinstall the driver. Kernel modules are very tightly coupled to the exact kernel version that they were compiled for, and DKMS is generally the preferred installation option because it automatically recompiles modules when needed.

Sorry, I did have dmesg output, I forgot to attach it:

[ +24.154411] usb 1-10: new full-speed USB device number 8 using xhci_hcd
[  +0.367854] usb 1-10: New USB device found, idVendor=044f, idProduct=b69c, bcdDevice= 1.01
[  +0.000005] usb 1-10: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[  +0.000002] usb 1-10: Product: Thrustmaster T128X GIP Racing Wheel
[  +0.000002] usb 1-10: Manufacturer: Thrustmaster
[  +0.000001] usb 1-10: SerialNumber: 0000E79F2C9B29F3
[  +0.015421] input: Generic X-Box pad as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:02.1/0000:05:00.0/0000:06:0c.0/0000:10:00.0/usb1/1-10/1-10:1.0/input/input32

I'm using the nix package, so there's no chance of a wrongly compiled version.

[Kimplul]

I'm using the nix package, so there's no chance of a wrongly compiled version.

Ah, I haven't touched Nix myself so I'm a bit out of my depth here. In any case, the driver is clearly not being loaded, next we'll have to figure out why. Does dmesg show something else when you try to manually modprobe the driver?

@RaySlash Do you happen to know what might be going on here?

[Henry-Hiles]

I'm using the nix package, so there's no chance of a wrongly compiled version.

Ah, I haven't touched Nix myself so I'm a bit out of my depth here. In any case, the driver is clearly not being loaded, next we'll have to figure out why. Does dmesg show something else when you try to manually modprobe the driver?

@RaySlash Do you happen to know what might be going on here?

Hi, no, it appears to be the same dmesg either way. It's worth noting that last time I had it working, I had it overriden to use a fork, as this was before T128 support was merged. Now its merged, and the nix package uses only a two week old commit, so I change it to use the regular packages. I don't think that should cause an issue?

[Henry-Hiles]

It's worth noting the pedals work fine, and the wheel does show up in jstest-gtk, but acts a bit weird.

[RaySlash]

@Henry-Hiles Hey, this should not happen really. Could you share your nix config for kernelModules. Also, are you blacklisting the default thrustmaster module?

    boot.blacklistedKernelModules = ["hid-thrustmaster"];
    boot.extraModulePackages = with config.boot.kernelPackages; [hid-tmff2];

[Henry-Hiles]

@Henry-Hiles Hey, this should not happen really. Could you share your nix config for kernelModules. Also, are you blacklisting the default thrustmaster module?

boot.blacklistedKernelModules = ["hid-thrustmaster"];
boot.extraModulePackages = with config.boot.kernelPackages; [hid-tmff2];

Hi, this is my config: https://git.federated.nexus/Henry-Hiles/nixos/src/branch/main/modules/desktop/wheel.nix

I haven't blacklisted the default one, it wasn't needed in the past, but I can try it!

[Henry-Hiles]

Tried blacklisting it, but no luck. It may be useful to see these couple lines after the other dmesg output the first time I plug it in:

[  +0.000107] usbcore: registered new interface driver xpad
[  +0.006183] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-thrustmaster
[  +3.049365] logitech-hidpp-device 0003:046D:407F.000A: HID++ 4.2 device connected.

[Henry-Hiles]

It's also worth noting I had this override when it was last working:

  boot.extraModulePackages = [
    (pkgs.linuxKernel.packages.linux_zen.hid-tmff2.overrideAttrs
      (prev: {
        src = pkgs.fetchFromGitHub {
          owner = "Kimplul";
          repo = "hid-tmff2";
          rev = "cc4226299569b5a1402c0b937c6b3a2e0f246af4";
          hash = "sha256-Hv6eLbf5K9qGhweKHHf7IpZaCFsLMCvC0vxBapQOSpQ=";
          fetchSubmodules = true;
        };
      }))
  ];

This is because at the time t128 support wasn't merged into main, but it now is, and the nix package is updated, so I removed the overlay for my new solution of boot.extraModulePackages = [config.boot.kernelPackages.hid-tmff2];

[Kimplul]

Guess he's as stumped as I am :)

I usually try not to butt in when others are helping, getting suggestions from multiple directions tends to just be confusing but it's been a while since the last response and I have a few things I'm curious about.

First of all, would you mind uninstalling the Nix package and installing the manual way, make/sudo make install etc. in the README? I would expect that the same issues persist, but if we're lucky there might be some different behaviour that could limit what the issue is. EDIT: Disregard, @RaySlash informed me Nix is strictly immutable so probably no point.

Does dmesg -w show anything when you modprobe the driver? I have some vague recollections that modprobe sometimes reports error on the command line and sometimes stays silent with dmesg printing some error. I guess it depends on where the error exactly happens, but I'm not sure about the exact details.

My current view of the situation is that from dmesg it looks like usb-thrustmaster is being loaded, and your wheel's ID looks to be what's expected, 0xb69c, but apparently probe is never being called, and I don't really know why that would be. The wheel is apparently picked up as a Generic X-Box pad, I guess it's possible that some generic USB input driver is getting preferred over usb-thrustmaster (I've had something similar happen in userspace) but not sure why, I'll have to look into generic USB handling. You'd imagine that the generic driver would be a fallback instead of one with priority, but I don't know if Nix has some custom patches applied that treat the wheel badly or something along those lines.

If it's not too much of a hassle, trying out some other distro in a virtual machine could also help pin point if this is a Nix issue or Linux issue or what, as long as the kernel version is approximately the same, but probably isn't strictly necessary.

[RaySlash]

It is a bit wierd. I am not having such a problem loading drivers at all (although its worth to mention I do own a T300RS). The model change should really make not much difference in loading the module.

Unfortunately, due to the complicated immutability of nix you cannot install modules without nix. Just for further testing, try adding the following lines. The goal is to further narrow down if it is driver not at being loaded or not.
Check and post your output of lsmod | grep hid before and after loading the module by yourself. I am asking to do so as it seems like a configuration issue rather than the driver itself.

PS Mind the rev and hash, it points to old revision. Make sure you update it using nix-prefetch or a similar tool. Im lazy. ggs

Module ( hid-tmff2.nix ) :

{ stdenv, lib, fetchFromGitHub, kernel, kmod }:

stdenv.mkDerivation rec {
    name = "hid-tmff2-${kernel.version}";
    version = "0.8";

    src = fetchFromGitHub {
        owner = "RaySlash";
        repo = "hid-tmff2";
        rev = "bab1afa2ecf5f9ebdac04d1bb1110f8f3111bb79";
        hash = "sha256-g29vB7uIyFUR4cifOCMtes0BCiEuwPfJQu3eVImj+jM=";
        fetchSubmodules = true;
    };

    nativeBuildInputs = kernel.moduleBuildDependencies ++ [ kmod ];

    makeFlags = kernel.makeFlags ++ [
        "KDIR=${kernel.dev}/lib/modules/${kernel.modDirVersion}/build"
    ];

    installFlags = [
        "INSTALL_MOD_PATH=${placeholder "out"}"
    ];

    meta = with lib; {
        description = "A linux kernel module for Thrustmaster T300RS and T248";
        homepage = "https://github.com/Kimplul/hid-tmff2";
        license = licenses.gpl3;
        maintainers = [ maintainers.rayslash ];
        platforms = platforms.linux;
    };
}

Add this to config to load the module ( hardware-configuration.nix ) :

{ config, pkgs, ... }:

let
    hid-tmff2 = config.boot.kernelPackages.callPackage ./hid-tmff2.nix {};
in
{
    boot.blacklistedKernelModules = [ "hid-thrustmaster" ];
    boot.extraModulePackages = [ hid-tmff2 ];
    boot.kernelModules = [ "hid-tmff2" ];
    # Use boot.kernelModules = [ hid-tmff2 ]; to enable the module. Then, the user can load it using:
    # $ sudo modprobe hid-tmff2
    # OR use "" to autoload the module at startup
# Rest of config
};

[MmAaXx500]

I'm not a nix user mysef, so I might be misinterpreting these files, but the rev is really old in both posted files. If you are using kernel 6.12 or newer the module is bound to fail to compile because you're missing #128 .