1169815 - Unable to browse files on phone from Ubuntu, when phone is in default "UMS" (USB Mass Storage) mode

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::System::Storage Mgmt, defect)

Description

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

STR:
 1. Take some photos from your B2G Phone.
 2. In settings, enable USB Storage, and make sure "UMS (USB Mass Storage)" is selected.
 3. Connect your phone to a computer using a USB cable.

EXPECTED RESULTS: Phone should show up in computer's list of devices to browse.


ACTUAL RESULTS: The phone doesn't show up in Nautilus (the file browser on Ubuntu). If I run gnome-disks (storage-device manager), I see an entry, but it looks un-mountable. It has "Model: SONY Mass Storage (0100)", and "Volumes" shows "No Media"

Testing on a Sony Xperia Z3, with a Firefox OS 3.0 build on it.
  Build Identifier: 20150528210322
  Update channel: dogfood
  Git commit info: 2015-05-28 19:50:18   18f7c340

(I can successfully mount the phone if I use MTP mode instead of UMS mode, btw.)

Comment 1

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(Step 1, taking photos, is unrelated to the bug; it's just there to be sure you have some files that could conceivably be browsed.)

Comment 2

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

I see this same issue on a Flame running latest Firefox OS 3.0 Nightly, too, from [1].  So, this seems to be a cross-device issue.

[1] https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/b2g/nightly/latest-mozilla-central-flame-kk/

Comment 3

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

I suspect this bug might be unexpected, given dhylands' bug 964601 comment 6, which said that MTP "doesn't work anywhere near as reliably as UMS."  (I'm seeing exactly the opposite.)

Comment 4

[Daniel Holbert [:dholbert]]

(To be clear, I don't have a SD card in this phone. Discussion else-thread suggests that UMS may only be expected to work for SD cards, which might be why I'm seeing nothing mounted/mountable when I connect my phone over USB.  If this is the case [i.e. if everything is working as-intended here], then I agree with :hub that we should make MTP the default, not UMS, per bug 1171556.  Otherwise, users will just get the impression that the "USB Storage" option in the Settings app just doesn't work.)

Comment 5

[Dave Hylands [:dhylands]]

At the time I made that comment, MTP was fairly unstable.

I also noticed that UMS wasn't working (even with an external sdcard) and started to look into it.

We should probably figure out what the correct thing to do when enabling UMS and there are no UMS sharable devices (on the aries, only the external sdcard is sharable, on the flame both internal and external devices are sharable).

Comment 7

[Dave Hylands [:dhylands]]

The UMS problem I ran into in comment 5 was caused by bug 1166320

I'm going to close this because this is behaving as expected.

There are other bugs files about improving the user experience when enabling UMS and no sdcard is present.