Oasis 3 sideloading: weirdness on Linux?

[NullNix]

So every previous Kindle I've ever owned has mounted fine on every OS I attach it to. But this one... on Win10 it's fine, but on every Linux box I own (everything from 4.4.x to 5.3.x kernels, everything from GalliumOS through Ubuntu through self-compiled Linux-from-scratch, mostly with USB mass storage support) I see nothing: no partitions appear, and the entire disk that does appear appears as a run of zero bytes (with the same length as the disk that should be there).

Has anyone else seen this? Before I spend time debugging -- which can't happen until mid-January in any case -- does anyone know what weirdness is going on and what on earth every single one of my fairly differently configured Linux kernels is missing that Win10 has got? I've literally never seen this with any USB storage device before at all (and I have a *lot*).

[j.p.s]

The user store on all my kindles prior to the Oasis 2 showed up as (for example) /dev/sde1

My Oasis 2, befor I started leaving it permanently USBnetworking enabled, showed up as /dev/sde
that is, an unpartitioned disk. I've had non-kindle readers do that, even for sd cards that are partitioned.

Mounting without a partition number has always worked for me in those cases.

What does dmesg say after an connection?

[NullNix]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

The user store on all my kindles prior to the Oasis 2 showed up as (for example) /dev/sde1

My Oasis 2, befor I started leaving it permanently USBnetworking enabled, showed up as /dev/sde
that is, an unpartitioned disk. I've had non-kindle readers do that, even for sd cards that are partitioned.

Mounting without a partition number has always worked for me in those cases.

What does dmesg say after an connection?

Oh! I never considered that possibility. dmesg says simply

[1473199.562953] usb 3-4.4.4.1: new high-speed USB device number 16 using xhci_hcd
[1473199.735272] usb-storage 3-4.4.4.1:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected
[1473199.747035] scsi host12: usb-storage 3-4.4.4.1:1.0
[1473200.793343] scsi 12:0:0:0: Direct-Access Kindle Internal Storage 0401 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
[1473200.803478] sd 12:0:0:0: Attached scsi generic sg11 type 0
[1473200.813659] sd 12:0:0:0: Power-on or device reset occurred
[1473200.825576] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdn] Attached SCSI removable disk
[1473200.993813] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdn] 13051821 512-byte logical blocks: (6.68 GB/6.22 GiB)
[1473201.219235] sd 12:0:0:0: [sdn] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[1473201.452705] sdn:

i.e. no partitions whatsoever.

Aaand a blkid is quite clear:

/dev/sdn: LABEL_FATBOOT="Kindle" LABEL="Kindle" UUID="386D-519E" TYPE="vfat"

... and do I ever feel like an idiot now. It mounts perfectly well as long as you just mount the raw partition.

Thank you! You've saved me who knows how much time debugging the usb layer hunting for a bug that wasn't there...

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by NullNix

Thank you! You've saved me who knows how much time debugging the usb layer hunting for a bug that wasn't there...

You're welcome.

I got used to this when USB mass storage was young and scads of devices used all kinds of partition schemes.

I still got a bit confused when I first saw it on my KOA2 because I was so sure I knew what kindles would do in that regard.

Interestingly enough, debian has started disabling ordinary user access to dmesg by default.